


Breathing Comes in Pairs

by SinningVirtue



Series: Live as Less Than Human [3]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Developing Relationship, M/M, PTSD, Protective Steve, Steve has hidden feels, Tony Feels, Tony gets it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-28
Updated: 2012-11-26
Packaged: 2017-11-13 01:41:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 33,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/498027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SinningVirtue/pseuds/SinningVirtue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He can't pin down the constantly shifting pieces, can't mend all the shattered bits of a heart that wishes it was mechanical, clear all the water from a pair of lungs that can't relearn how to breathe around the obstruction. </p><p>And Steve doesn't have to.</p><p>Tony's still everything he was before, still Iron Man. He can see it in the way he fights back, the way he still aches to fix the things out of his control, the way he still bothers to breathe in pairs, despite the water.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Breath

**Author's Note:**

> It's, again, one in the morning, all mistakes are mine and YAY multichapter, because I couldn't put everything I wanted in just a oneshot.  
> PLEASE comment, it warms my heart and makes me want to write more.

Tony was a choked breath, stuttered in the cage of his chest with wild eyes and flushed skin, a drop of sweat that made a pattern on the sharp curve of his hip, the beginning of a bruise forming on his shoulder. But his movements were wind, a dancer unfurling wings, barely touching the ground and skimming around the edges of Steve’s blows like he knew where they would come from. Less boxing, more dancing, less martial arts and more magic.

 

Steve’s eyes caught the blue and purple tinge blooming across taught golden skin like a dying flower, marring a sculpted perfection, a stain on the sun.

 

Something sick rolled in his stomach and the way Tony favored his left shoulder imprinted on his mind, singed into his brain, and his limbs felt shaky, weakened like they belonged again to a scrawny asthmatic with a mouth too big for his thin face. 

 

Worse; like the animal eyes of the men who cornered him in back alleys, fists like stone and gazes dead to everything but the way he bit back screams.

 

He’d fallen that far, cornered a man with a mechanical heart to keep the broken one beating, pinned him up against a mat that made his skin stick, and drawn a wince from lips that had tasted the bitter waters of torture and the tang of heated iron. 

 

“You’re pulling punches,” Tony snapped, eyes wild and missing the fear that clawed at Steve’s chest. 

 

He moved like the floor was aflame, like he had no choice but to possess grace and bend it to his will, and Steve thought he was dancing.

 

He didn’t know how to handle this, what to do with all the strength packed into overly large muscles, how to react to Tony’s need to push and be pushed, to stumble and right himself under his own power and hit back with enough force to send Steve’s world spinning. 

 

He’d gotten lost and Tony had gotten bruised, marred by the hands that had pulled him from nightmares and pried open years of pain and hurt and had smoothed over scars and old wounds.

 

Steve was pulling punches, because something in him screamed when he didn’t.

 

“Stop doing that, I’m not going to shatter.”

 

His voice was the bite of whiskey on the way down, the burn of nimble fingers on hot metal.

 

It was everything Steve’s ever heard shouted down a comm link, the only thing tying Tony to the rest of the world when he was in free flight and barely cognizant of the choices he was making, and the chatter kept him from diving into the abyss, because people talked back. And when Coulson barked down the line for Tony to _just shut up _then at least he remembered he was on a team.__

 

That people were at his back and wouldn’t hurt him.

 

That Steve wouldn’t hurt him.

 

And everything changed for Steve, the moment he met Tony’s eyes and saw something less than the mask he’d come to know. Now, Steve could handle slow words in the cover of darkness, touches that just skimmed the edges of a dream and breaths that were stuttered and sweet and never heavy, never labored. 

 

Tony stared at Steve until the soldier realized he hadn’t moved, had rooted himself to the spot in a defensive position, arms up and ready to block when he should be pushing, always pushing the genius who pushed first, who’d been training with Natasha for months to refine the hard edges and pack muscle into a lean body and defined abs and a perfection made real by scars and a blue heart.

 

“Don’t know my own strength sometimes,” Steve said finally, the quiet of the gym pressing down on him from all sides. 

 

Tony rolled his eyes, ran a hand through his hair until it stuck up in all directions, wet on his forehead from sweat.

 

“I can take it.”

 

Steve thought of the way Tony woke from nightmares, a scream rising to his lips and his hands clawing at the arc reactor like someone was trying to pry it loose from his chest. He thought of words babbled in a human voice reeking of fear without the Iron Man modulator to fix it, and the smell of the Hudson. He thought of the way a reporter made all the life in Tony’s eyes drain away, and the way the smaller man felt beneath his arm and tucked to his side.

 

Something in him was breaking; the feel of Tony’s skin beneath his fist was too much for him to take when he thought about trailing fingertips over the ridges of his muscles and the rise of his cheekbones. 

 

But Tony needed this, needed harsh and untamable and punch, kick, roll, dodge, up again, to prove to himself that nothing was different. that nothing had changed.

 

Steve realized that for him, nothing had. 

 

Tony had been living with water in his lungs for over two years now, breathing around it, and forcing himself up when the weight of it pushed him down. This was just another day for him, another sparring session, another punch and dodge.

 

“I know you can,” Steve answered strongly, something like pride weaving its way in and out of his voice. A confused look blanketed Tony’s face for a moment, the crinkle of a brow and twitch of lips downward before it cleared, swept clean and scattered. 

 

They were close enough to touch, Steve with arms still raised, feet apart to balance his weight, and Tony with one foot nearly reaching his left, pushed up on the balls of his feet and bouncing slightly, energy rolling off of him in waves.

 

A smile replaced it, quick smirk that left Steve a little more than breathless, warm in the recesses of his heart.

 

“Good.” 

 

Tony shifted, rocking forward with an arm shooting into the space between shoulder and neck and catching at Steve’s neck with the crook of his elbow as the soldier lunged backwards, Tony’s left leg darting out in an elegant arch to knock Steve’s legs out from under him.

 

“I would hate for you to underestimate me.” 

 

Tony’s voice was a breath of smugness as it ghosted across his face, his eyes a wicked glee that radiated through the spaces between them until Steve was smiling too, the kind that consumes his whole face.

 

He struggled, bucking up against Tony’s well practiced hold, breaking it only when he was close enough to taste the genius’ heartbeats and feel stray drops of sweat splash down on his bare stomach. There was something in Tony’s eyes as Steve flipped them, something in the sea of dark brown that was the beginning and the end of the whole world.

 

It hurt to look at him sometimes.

 

Like you could find the answers you didn’t want to know, could see the cracks in a perfection you were more than content with. Like air and fire and sparks and water and quiet and broken. Like hurricanes that bent trees in elegant arcs and swept away the solid presence of a home.

 

But Steve could never look away, never wanted to.

 

“Never,” Steve answered, resting beneath Tony’s slackened grip long enough for the sound of their breathing to become deafening, the pieces of them that had been torn away in the heat of pure physical exertion to creep back in with the familiarity of childhood nightmares. 

 

The arc reactor pressed against his chest, its ring digging a shallow imprint into Steve’s skin. 

 

It felt like home.

 

Xx

 

New York was splayed out before him, a memory preserved in ink and paper with ghosts in the reflection of store front windows and echoes in every balcony victory garden, a home in the way sunlight shone on the pristine paint of a passing car, frozen with the spark at its most blinding.

 

Tony’s fingers brushed the edge of the page, the large sketchpad balanced on his knees as his eyes traced elegant lines of street lamps and sidewalks a man had walked in the time he belonged to. Who twined his thin fingers with the fabric of Brooklyn and kissed the stale air with words that inspired enough to give him a body to match his heart. 

 

A man who catalogued cracks in the concrete with a picture-perfect memory and stared at the cinema door with longing eyes and not enough money in his pocket to watch Gene Kelly dance his way into the heart of America. 

 

A hero who memorized back alleys with the taste of a punch to the gut and the sound of thin-soled shoes running from cops or shop keepers who thought to stem the bleeding before he stained the ground.

 

The edges were unclear, blurry, as if remembered from a dream he didn’t want to shatter further by giving it clarity, thought. And at the end of the street, so far out of the line of sight that it was only a shadow against the dying light of a Brooklyn sundown, the flicker of a person. The brick buildings braced him on both sides, hands of the past cradling a man with the body of a boy. 

 

The shadow struck Tony breathless, fingers hovering over the thin, sickly creature, the ghost standing as tall as he could beneath the weight of the past and the frailty of his bones. 

 

The shield was held slack in one hand, the only color in the piece, making the body sag with its weight as the bottom kissed the street, dared to be rested fully. But the ghost held.

 

It would always hold.

 

Tony swallowed, a weight settling somewhere behind the arc reactor.

 

He turned the page, his breath catching in a half-swallowed name that struck a chord somewhere deep inside of him, spoke to him of all the little secreted thoughts he’d ever had about a man just as perfect as the idol he inspired, the hero he always was. Tony shouldn’t think those things, shouldn’t hold that warmth inside of him and cling to it, shouldn’t destroy it like he knew he would.

 

The future, his present, was hard and unyielding and alien before a man who hulked above his prior image, a shield held before him as if to protect himself from the sharp edges and sparkling buildings that reached for the sky. They caged him in, and the half-shadow of his face was impenetrable and stern, a glimmer of fear shooting through eyes Tony could barely make out in their distance. 

 

Mirror images Steve could never rid himself of, duality of life he couldn’t escape, where every step was a reminder of what he’d lost and the foreign ground he’d gained. The set of shoulders, still worn like new and unfamiliar, were curved inward trying to shutter himself away, afraid of the future he didn’t get to grow into. The new air he didn’t want to taste, new streets he didn’t want to walk.

 

A new Stark he didn’t want to meet.

 

He could barely remember why he'd gone in, carried only the distant memory of a comfort that suffocated his sins and made the rest of him shine brighter, walked through the open door with Steve's name on his lips and his shirt slung over his shoulder. He was still breathing harshly, a bruise resting comfortably on his shoulder with a dull ache that whispered his worth in the ability to get back up, sweat staining his skin. 

 

The room was empty, a sketchbook open and scattered with pencils on the custom desk Tony’d given him weeks ago, already spotted with paint and charcoal fingerprints that reminded Tony of children coloring the walls, white glue and Crayola come alive and grown up with the soul of someone shoved out of the world and thrown into a new one.

 

When he swept the pencils out of the way, his breath caught.

 

And he stared at a past he could never touch and Steve could never be rid of and felt something in him splinter. He saw a future he belonged to and Steve could never breathe in without a ripple of fear and felt his scarred heart clench.

 

And he didn’t think of Afghanistan.

 

He didn’t think of the way water slipped on his skin like it belonged there, determined to fill every crevice and fissure his body had to offer with the bitter taste of death indifferent. 

 

He thought of breathing, and the way Steve’s chest rose and fell with Tony pressed against it, held tight until it seemed he would try to burrow down to reach the heart, where a steady beat would never match the whirr of his reactor, or the always accelerated staccato of the one that sat behind it. The one so few knew was real.

 

He thought Steve had seen that, seen him.

 

He could do the same. Could flick his eyes from his own in a mirror that illustrated his marred agony, broken to the last piece of him, to meet the steady gaze of the only man who’d bothered to stand beside him and see what Tony saw. 

 

"JARVIS, image these, blow them up, I think you know what to do," Tony whispered, his voice a cracked murmur in the thick silence of Steve's room. 

 

“Of course Sir,” JARVIS answered, a strange tint to the AI that Tony couldn’t fathom, didn’t program. But it sat warm in the room, and it made Tony smile. 

 

The sketchbook was back where it belonged, pencils laid down to rest exactly how he had found them. Tony stretched, muscles pulling with the soft burn of their earlier work out, where Steve had realized he could take it, and Tony had felt heat and safety and perfect flip just enough for it to still be real. 

 

His shirt trailed on the floor from slack fingers, his eyes trailing a last, lingering over the vibrant blues and reds of the shield, _Steve’s _shield, with a reverence he usually reserved for the hum of machinery and the hiss of his armor sliding into place, before ducking back into the hallway, where his present, Steve's future, was waiting.__

 

Xx

 

_“—Captain Rogers was seen in a close, and what could be deemed a compromising position, with the notorious playboy Mr. Tony Stark, CEO of Stark Industries AKA Iron Man, leaving a secluded restaurant with his arm around the billionaire. Further development on what could very well be a blossoming romance is currently unknown, but many officials and outraged citizens are calling for the immediate disbandment of the Avengers Initiative, as well as the removal of Mr. Stark from his position as CEO of SI. Whether the government has anything to say about the alleged activities of Captain America and Iron Man remains to be seen. Stay tuned for more details.” ___

The silence that followed consumed, slipped beneath their skin and filled them up from the inside, until they were rapt and quiet before a screen filled with Tony tucked to Steve’s side, his dark eyes on the ground, tracing splinters in the sidewalk and the pristine shine of his shoes.

 

Tony was drowning, water pouring down his throat and into every piece of him that had been shattered so many times before in front of cameras and pundits and a public that hated to love him and loved to hate him. 

 

He remembered the Reckoning Day, when his mind had changed the equations of his world to stop seeing the numbers instead of the heartbeats, the breaths and the smiles. And he gave up the Merchant of Death, turned his back on his father’s empire of decaying bodies, and the ashes fell like snow, blanketing his face until the public saw a failure drenched in his sins. 

 

And they hated him for everything he was and everything he could be and they hated when he saved people and they hated when he couldn’t reach someone in time, and the clock kept ticking and another heart stopped beating. 

 

He was used to the world’s back to him, alone on the outside looking into a realm he could never really touch, never live inside of and be consumed in all the fantastic, mystical ways one can be consumed by the human consciousness and the way fingers interlock and people hold on to anyone they can reach.

 

He was used to being stuck behind a pane of glass, now a blue glow to add to the faded reflection. He was used to seeing himself hollowed out by bitter words and cheap shots and the way he couldn’t _fix it _. The way he could never find all the pieces of himself the news had ripped out and scattered.__

 

But Steve didn’t deserve that. 

 

Steve was so much more than a man who built his career on the outstretched hands of dead children, who was rocked into complacency by the Second Father that would take his new heart in his hands and rip, leave him with the hole he’d always had, gasping around a pain he’d come to accept. 

 

Steve was _better _than the billionaire who fancied himself a hero, the mask that couldn’t stop himself from speaking, tin can that couldn’t keep his name to himself, in the desperate hope to be redeemed. To be accepted.__

 

Tony was drowning, like the first time all over and he couldn’t _breathe _, struck silent amidst the people he’d invited into his tower, who’d helped him make it a home, a copy of _Lord of the Rings _held in numb fingers.____

 

He could feel their eyes trailing over him, could feel all the carefully erected walls strewn about him in tatters of their former glory, the impassive face of the Iron Man ripped away from a child that was never held and a boy whose father always found a fault and a teenager who got kidnapped regularly and a man who just wanted to _fix it _.__

 

Steve’s gaze was a weight that settled between his shoulder blades and dispelled all images of a skinny asthmatic standing before the imprint of a past he could never return to, shoved away the determination to prove to Steve that he was needed and the years he left behind could be put to rest in peace in the back of his mind and the forefront of his sight, where the new world might not be so frightening, so daunting.

 

Because Tony knew how much it hurt to forget, to feel pieces of the things that made you slip away, and you hold onto the mechanical arm you made at fifteen, empty and drunk to keep you company so you didn’t forget what it was like to be alone, or to be loved by something you’d made with your own hands.

 

Those things were chased away with the sound of his own breathing, harsh in his ears, so much like when he danced on a mat in the gym earlier, and Steve had pushed him far enough for the burn to make him feel used up and spent out and _finally _ending the cool water that flowed through his blood and made his skin cold.__

 

He missed the fire, the heat that chased away every memory of choking on his vomit and screaming until he imagined he could feel his throat stripping away, piece by piece. 

 

Just like every other part of him: in pieces.

 

Steve watched Tony reign himself in, bring in every shard of metal until the armor behind his eyes was reassembled and even Natasha couldn’t see below it, could only gather what she could from the half-second of devastation that had peeked out from behind a shadowed curtain. 

 

He smiled, all sharp wit and media, flashing cameras in his mind that made Steve sick to his stomach, left him with a sour taste in his mouth. 

 

“Could they really not report on the mutant alien thing from two days ago that smacked me into the fucking Hudson? I didn’t think human interest took precedent over giant aliens, but I guess they just can’t get enough of us, Cap. It’s the dashing good looks. Or the awesome. _I _think it’s the awesome.”__

 

Tony’s voice was bright enough to lay sunlight to waste, to make it lie down and fold in on itself under the shine of it. It drew a snorted laugh from Clint, bent over on the couch with a tumbler full of clear Vodka that looked so much like water. 

 

So much like the fear that wormed its way into Tony’s gaze in the middle of the night.

 

But his voice was wiped clear of it, and his eyes were shuttered and even the blue light of the arc reactor seemed muted.

 

A moment, held on the last thin string that bound them together, where Steve’s lips thinned and his eyes grew sharp and unyielding and his hands itched for his shield to protect Tony and himself. A moment where every freedom he’d ever fought for had been spit on and it burned in his chest and demanded to be heard, to be felt. Where Steve was caught on the edge of a time he was sure had advanced, had grown into something beautiful and whole, where all people were treated the with the rights all of humanity deserved, and the underside of it had finally shown itself, justices never realized, _people never treated like people _.__

 

But Tony caught his gaze, begged with every visible pain that had shocked through him when he woke in the early hours of the morning, Steve’s arms wrapped tightly around him and his voice stuttering on the beginnings of a scream.

 

So Steve stayed silent, cracked a half-smile that felt bitter and twisted on his face, left his chest heavy, and he sat on the couch next to Tony as they started the movie, careful to keep his shoulder touching the smaller man’s. 

 

Careful to prove that the anger singing dirges in his veins wasn’t for Tony. Could never be for Tony.

 

As the smaller man folded himself onto the couch, Steve caught the glimmer of his cell phone and the quick tap of adept fingers, scrambling to fix things that weren't broken yet.

 

“Okay, so the rules of _Lord of the Rings _drinking game,” Tony announced, his phone slipped away as if it'd never been there. He held his own full tumbler of whiskey, nearly spilling over the sides in small amber rivers that would catch on his fingers and draw patterns down calluses and scars and dripping from his wrist like a drop of poisonous blood. “Every time Legolas looks into the distance, one shot. Every time Frodo and Sam have an intimate moment, one shot. Close up of the ring, one sip. Panoramic scenery shot, two sips. Every time Merry and Pippin get up to shenanigans, one shot." He paused, considering the Avengers scattered around his media room. "Bruce, you good to go?”__

 

Bruce smiled when he met Tony’s gaze, the other man’s a frenzy of excitement that staggered on the edge of false, a depth of understanding hidden beneath Bruce’s eyes, and Steve could feel it. Could tell that whispered words across lab space had settled deep in Tony’s chest and made him feel more human, before he had Steve or anyone else to turn to.

 

“I took a Xanax,” the scientist answered, saluting Tony with his small glass, a knowing look passed between the two of them as the others breathed out a sigh of relief, Coulson relaxing back into his lone arm chair on the other side of the room, inconspicuously tucking a copy of Hulk Damage Report #276 into his suit jacket pocket.

 

Steve thought it amazing how unafraid Tony was of the Hulk, of the monster Bruce held loosely in his hands. 

 

Maybe Tony had grown used to monsters sharing space with a mind. Maybe he knew what it was like to be isolated so completely.

 

“Are you high yet?” Tony asked, a childish glee settling in over his face, a grin that seemed real for the first time that night. 

 

“That’s for me to know,” Bruce answered, leaning back further into the embrace of his armchair, a glazed look fogging over his eyes. 

 

“If we don’t start the movie, I’m going to drink all of mine and all of yours,” Natasha cut in, noting her already half-empty glass with a pointed look. 

 

“Alright, alright, bossy. Everyone clear on the rules?” A sea of nods and a grin from Thor from over the top of his large mug of Asguardian mead answered him. “Steve, where’s your drink?”

 

“I can’t get drunk,” Steve answered, a small smile gracing his face with the kind of simple sincerity that knocked Tony back long enough to appreciate how warm it was, how it made the darkened living room seem brighter.

 

“That is no reason why you should not be drinking,” Tony said flatly, pouring another tumbler full of his favorite poison and holding it out to empty air.

 

Steve looked reluctant, his eyes trailing over Tony’s face as if looking for a splinter in the mask cracked by the clipped words of a newscaster, anything that proved he was as worn and tattered on the inside as Steve felt, as rocked by the injustices he’d thought the world would have moved passed.

 

The future wasn’t that new after all, he thought sadly.

 

“Steeeve, I thought you were in the Army,” Tony whined and baited all at once, a childishness settling over his features with a comfortable wear, a spark behind his eyes when Steve’s fingers brushed his in taking the glass.

 

“Finally,” Natasha muttered, worming her way deeper into her thick quilt, propping her feet on Clint’s lap as they toasted each other in the darkness of the media room. 

 

“Let’s do this thing,” Clint agreed happily.

 

Easily chatter was abandoned as ears split and minds cracked, drove tumblers to the coffee table with spilled amber and clear mixing, hands pressed over their heads.

 

The television flickered, black and white static that shouldn’t have been possible on a StarkTV, a screech that rivaled the banshee that attempted to kill every lawmaker in Congress two weeks ago and dug deep down inside their minds and festered there. Tony flinched, the full body twitch of someone conditioned to react to unknowns, to fear the world that lay beyond his comprehension, and Steve laid a hand on his shoulder automatically, reaching, always reaching, for the man that lay inside the webbed darkness of nightmares. 

 

Whiskey flowed like a waterfall onto the black leather couch slipping down the Persian rug in a cruel imitation of the water that had trailed rivers on his skin and down his esophagus. 

 

“What the _hell _was that?” Tony demanded when the noise finally subsided, Steve’s fingers digging into his shoulder and drawing him back from a desert and a bucket and (he didn’t know it) a sonic paralyzer that rendered him vulnerable. Left him gasping, drowning from the inside and unable to even scream, to even buck against the bonds.__

 

He flexed his fingers experimentally around the glass, half a tumbler left and perfect motor function. 

 

He knew that, of course he did.

 

“I apologize Man of Iron,” Thor rumbled, his voice transcending whispers and murmurs and taking the consistency of thunder and ozone and ripping through all the broken pieces of Tony’s life. “I had sat upon the All Powerful Control Device.” The God’s eyes were cast down, his shoulders hunched inward slightly.

 

A moment passed, where the only sound was Tony's ragged breathing, and no one could meet his eyes. It stretched on infinite, wrapping around them until the tension felt like it would shatter all at once.

 

And then.

 

Tony swallowed, slowly easing back down into the seat he hadn’t realized he’d risen from, tension cast from his shoulders in a heavy exhale and inhale in again, because breathing comes in pairs, and laughed.

 

It was breathless and desperate and everything he needed and everything he was, and Steve followed him over the edge, Clint and Bruce next, shoulders shaking and real. Real like media news wasn’t and like mutant aliens unfortunately were, real like the pain that settled behind the reactor and real like Steve’s hand on his shoulder. Natasha and Coulson smiled, something more Honest-to-God than Tony had ever seen from either of them, and he laughed harder, bent over and spilling more whiskey to pool onto the floor.

 

It caught his skin and trailed like he knew it would, but he didn’t really feel it.

 

“---called a _remote _, Thor. I know you know that. Don’t lie to me,” Tony sputtered around hilarity that sat warm inside of him, Steve’s hand sliding from his shoulder to a loose half-embrace.__

 

In a moment, Tony would tell JARVIS to play the movie, and they would settle into a world that kept him sane in youth, and Tony would think, fleetingly, that he was grateful for the resolute refusal of his team to acknowledge the slip into darkness. He would correct himself, less a team, more a family. And it would feel right.

 

But for the moment, he let himself gasp for air around a feeling that left him desperate for the next breath in a pair in a good way, with a strong arm around his back, Steve next to him, Captain America red in the face and barely breathing, laughter like music and bright lights and bursts of perfect joy.

 

Like fireworks.

 

Xx

 

“You can do better than that!” 

 

Steve was an easy gust of air that blew hair back from a forehead and left you breathing in something cleaner, that tumbled pure and innocent into your lungs. He was a bright smile and gasping laugh, chuckle that rolled around the gym and caught the light filtering in from a New York morning.

 

He was comfortable power, moving inside his skin like he belonged there, it able to give him the ability to match a dream and to pull a man back from the dark places inside of his mind. He moved like air, curling around nothing and using it, twisting but not dancing, animal refined.

 

“I am death,” Tony said darkly, ducking behind another punch that had makeshift wind kissing his face. He basked in it for a moment, anything to distract him from the constant pulse-pound of a hard-earned hangover and the numbing fire of training.

 

“Told you so.”

 

Bastard didn’t even sound sorry.

 

“I hate you. JARVIS, make a note, I hate Steve.”

 

“Of course you do, Sir,” his AI answered, unruffled as ever. A pause, and Tony knew he had more to say, always knew the worth of a weighted silence. “Ms. Potts has asked me to remind you of the four board meetings you have scheduled today.”

 

Tony righted himself from his defensive position with the flick of some internal switch he wasn't aware of; he had a presentation of new StarkToaster the Avengers had been unknowingly beta testing for him. Let it never be said there was a technology Tony Stark had not improved. 

 

Deep brown eyes shifted, caught the end of an unguarded look, clear blue eyes swimming with quiet disappointment. 

 

Steve looked down, eyes trailing over the careful athletic tape that scratched against his skin, and tried not to think about the quick witted smirk, the half-formed idea of wandering around Central Park to see how much had changed, and he hadn’t really looked at Brooklyn yet, had stayed long enough to sketch it and run, bile in his mouth and his eyes stained red. He’d thought Tony would walk with him.

 

Travel roads of a past and future Steve was forced to live through.

 

Maybe erase paths of water etched over Tony’s eyes and get him to see something beautiful, something to restore just a piece of the faith in humanity he’d lost. To see past desert sun’s and arc reactors to appreciate the way New York streets caught heat and pressed it close in their embrace, until the pavement singed, and the way the sky was so close to the color of his second heart. 

 

He’d forgotten how much of the world demanded a piece of Tony Stark.

 

“Tell you what, JARVIS, reschedule.”

 

Steve’s gaze snapped up, shock rippling through him and it tasted sweet on his tongue. Tony’s voice was casual, an easy grin on his lips as he flicked his eyes to the ceiling, and Steve wondered what kind of person he imagined when he talked to JARVIS, if he did at all. 

 

“Push it back another day; I’m already late for the first one, no point in going now,” he said brightly.

 

“Shall I inform Miss Potts of your whole-hearted investment in another technological breakthrough?” JARVIS asked, and Steve thought he sounded approving, his cool British tones layered with something that made a smile itch at him, unable to stay hidden. 

 

“You spoil me,” Tony chirped back, already mopping at his glistening face with his T-shirt. “What’s our most recent breakthrough, honeybear?”

 

“That would be the Quinjet, Sir,” JARVIS answered, though Tony likely already knew the answer, by the sour look that shadowed his face before the AI even spoke. A hologram appeared before him, separating Steve and Tony with streams of light. 

 

Steve watched with something edging on awe, just listening to the way they worked together, man and machine, products of the future he felt more a part of than that of just outside.

 

“That’s Avenger’s tech. No touchie. We have the specs for the commercial version on backlog, don’t we? Pepper doesn’t know about that, and the reactor technology’s a hot ticket with the investors. First name in clean air travel. Should do us a world of good,” Tony muttered to himself as he dabbled in the light, flung useless documents to the side and brought up a revolving model of an airplane with sleek lines and incomprehensible equations clinging to it in messy writing.

 

“Climate Change was in the history packet SHEILD gave me,” Steve said suddenly. Tony jumped, forgotten he was there, but unafraid, and it made something in Steve slide into place. “Did you just solve it as an _afterthought _?”__

 

Sometimes the implications of Tony's genius astounded him.

 

He wasn't afraid to admit it.

 

There was no hiding the impressed tinge to Steve’s voice, and Tony looked away, ducking his head as he fiddled with the light, finger painted in the work that would change the world. Steve doubted many would turn their heads to see, to marvel at the beauty he preserved and the brilliance he created.

 

“Sometimes it's an accident,” Tony murmured, tapping at his blue heart lightly. 

 

“I don’t think this was.”

 

“What are we still doing here? Don’t we have somewhere to be?” Tony asked suddenly, and the light parted like a Red Sea as he passed through it, webs of cool blue slipping from each other and dissolving into nothingness. 

 

He marched with purpose to the door to the gym, the brightness of the room catching the way sweat beaded between his shoulder blades. Tony stopped suddenly, blinking back to reality and his brown eyes roamed the room as if making sure everything was still real, that he hadn’t dreamed all the Avenger’s equipment and Kevlar-enforced punching bags and Steve. 

 

“Where are we going, anyway?”

 

And Steve felt that almost worrisome warmth bloom in his chest and take hold of his beating heart, it tapped out a new rhythm that said Tony trusted him, it whispered about things Steve didn’t understand, was afraid of and enticed by. It told him about Tony, and the brilliance that reached a climax in the cover of darkness, because sunlight was too afraid to be compared to it, about hangovers and the deft ability to dispel them when he needed to, about coffee and the way Tony wouldn’t speak until he’d had two cups, but still sat next to Steve. 

 

“I don’t know yet. We’ll find out.”

 

Steve smiled, because he couldn’t help it, because something in his soul told him to. 

 

The grin he got in response was a quirk of lips and shine of eyes that imprinted themselves on Steve’s memory, a litany of images he would later tediously sketch out to preserve forever, and he would let himself think about Tony as more than a friend for the moments it took in transition from mind to paper.

 

Tony smiled back because he’d found some kind of home here, with a man who promised to breathe for him if he needed it, to pull him up from the waves of the past and save him from drowning. Later, in the comfortable chaos of the workshop, Tony would think about the nearly desperate way he _had _to rid Steve of that sad look, and he would let himself imagine that he felt the same way when he looked at Tony. He would let himself think of embraces the color of something deeper and the sound of heartbeats and the feeling of breathing together, in pairs.__

 

“Sounds perfect.”


	2. A Sigh

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so I've gone through this a few times, and I'm pretty happy with it, any mistakes are mine, and will probably be edited out in the next few days.  
> Please comment, it honestly means the whole world to me when you guys do.  
> Initially this was only going to be three chapters, but I'm thinking it'll be more.  
> Thanks for reading!  
> -Han

Central Park breathed sunlight, layered it down in cascading lines of gold that caught themselves on the green skin of rustling leaves and cast strange shadows on the dirt pathway. It swallowed exhaust fumes and the roar of subway cars until only the faintest echo lingered with the stale hue New York City hadn’t lost in the seventy years he’d been away from it.

 

Some things didn’t change.

 

The heartbeat of New York was one of them, and the way it breathed like it was its own person, wandering dirty street corners and dark alleyways at night with the unsteady staccato beat of dress shoes on pavement and cigarettes curling smoke and lighting embers in the darkness, drunk on its own life and the sour taste of a hooker.

 

Slipping back into crisp suits and cheap coffee in the morning.

 

He wished he could have seen what Times Square was like when the boys came back home from Germany and Japan, when manic relief rained down on them like sun that bounded at odd angles from glass and steel that reached towards the sky.

 

The same sun warmed him, and it didn’t feel like he was burning slowly through layers of too-fragile skin like it did when his voice was too deep for his size and his bones jutted from his body with all the awkward horror of an emaciated corpse.

 

Instead, it kissed him lightly, like Steve imagined a lover might, curled around his body with a soft press of warmth and trailed its gold fingers across him like Tony did as they were falling asleep, drawing equations on the corded muscle of Steve’s arms, and the soft sighs of his breathing lulled him to sleep with whispers of a Central Park breeze.

 

He flicked his gaze to Tony, prying them from the roof of rustling trees to find something fractured in Tony’s eyes, something cracked open by the insistent hands of sloping hills and the bright fires of flowers crowding close to their dirt path.

 

Steve thought he looked like he was seeing for the first time, taking in all the uncontrolled beauty crammed inside an industrial cradle, hands that pinned in the sky and this one fragile piece of perfect, of life.

 

Tony looked caught on the edge of a frenzied breath of alive, swallowed by the same open-eyed awe that consumed him when technology slotted together by the calluses on his hands and that strange mechanical fire in his heart.

 

Fascination and alive for the first time in so long.

 

Like he’d gotten his first clear breath, without water in the way.

 

On the long walk from the Tower to the Park, Tony talked, nervousness a strange lilt in his voice, like he couldn’t tell secrets beneath the sunlight, needed the darkness to make him safe. To make it harder to see Steve’s reaction when the words slammed home into his heart.

 

He said he hadn’t been to Central Park since he was six, and his mother had taken him to a playground for the first time, sober for once and Tony manic in his excitement, little boy babbling equations inside their limousine and tracing them into the window pane with oil-stained fingers.

 

And he’d danced (Tony laughed around this, like the words tasted funny in his mouth) in the warm embrace of a sunlight he’d never experienced so fully, and wondered aloud what kind of machine it would take to harness all of that warmth and convert it into energy that sparked and filled everything is brought to life with something sweeter, something better.

 

The other children didn’t like the way he spoke in numbers, didn’t understand his strange language of bubbling need to be heard and a fear of rejection. Tony came home with blood staining his knees a rusty brown-red and he wouldn’t talk about merging technology and sunlight, afraid of the way small hands pushed back, as  if to drive the warmth from his skin, his soul.

 

He never went back.

 

But he did for Steve, trailing his fingers over the flowers he could reach, slipping over their petals like they were precious and fragile.

 

Steve could smell Tony beneath the faux-fresh air, motor oil and machinery and _life_. Pulsing with the energy that never left Tony, even when he whispered to Steve in the middle of the night about water and the weight on his lungs and the way it felt to twine his fingers with death and be pulled back, something that burned still flickered in his wavering voice.

 

Tony looked like he was finding new realities, a new religion of beauty and science and something that made him feel new.

 

Steve watched it unfold with the kind of reverence his mother reserved for Christmas church, the quick fingers of captivation and the slow curl of something deeper inside his chest. Fire that gave new meaning and singed away the water.

 

“Do you ever think it would have been better if you didn’t wake up?” Tony asked suddenly, voice the same tenor of midnight confessions and carrying the tangible weight of daylight.

 

Real.

 

So much more real than when he whispered in the dark, and maybe that was why he did it. Maybe this was how Steve knew that Tony trusted him, when Tony could talk to him without a latticework of dreams blocking out the weight his words had, the strength it took to speak them.

 

“No.”

 

“Never?” Tony asked, a tinge of curiosity coloring his forced casual voice. He slipped his hands into his pockets and set his eyes determinedly on the small pieces of sky he could see between the trees. “You never think it would be easier to have just died when logic said you should have?”

 

“Easier? Yeah.” Steve rubbed a hand over his jaw, watched the way Tony watched the movement, like Steve was more fascinating than the way flowers reached out to snag on Tony’s pant leg. “Death is so much easier than life could ever be, but that’s why we have to keep living it. What would the point be if we didn’t fight to keep going?”

 

Tony was silent for a moment, watching his oil-stained converse kick up dirt in whispers of helloes and goodbyes, the lingering touch dust left on the hem of his form-hugging jeans.

 

“I thought you believed in heaven, something amazing waiting for you.” He said quietly, rolling the words slowly in his mouth and tasting them, trying to find the right ones out of the infinite he knew. “Why wouldn’t you take that over the pain?”

 

“Because no heaven could compare to life,” Steve answered immediately, turning slightly to meet Tony’s dark eyes turned soft brown by the sunlight and thought they seemed to be swelling from the inside with something softer than Steve was used to seeing.

 

Something that brushed delicate, trembling, fingers over marble sculpture and breathed life into it, and skimmed across the surface of the sky and made it solid enough to fold into an arc reactor.

 

“Nothing could match this-this… _aching_ perfection we’re surrounded by, the pain and fear and hope and courage a-and love.” Steve stumbled over his own words, caught up by the flare of passion in his chest. He swallowed down another breath, kept it slow and soothing in his lungs before sighing it back out, letting the silence grow for a moment and give his next words weight enough to mean something. “If heaven were just as heartbreakingly perfect, why would God bother to create the world in the first place?”

 

“Maybe it was an accident. Maybe everything is just a series of horrible, unfortunate accidents and coincidences and there’s nothing meant for us but entropy,” Tony whispered, a secret fear the texture of wings, fluttering against the cage of his heart and growing heavy in the slow rise of water.

 

“You don’t believe that any more than I do.”

 

“You’re right. But it’s harder to look at it the way you do.” Steve wondered what it must be like to live with a brain that had all the answers, except the ones you needed the most. “Because I _know_ what people are capable of, what I-what _I’m_ capable of. And it’s not beautiful. There’s nothing beautiful about it”

 

He looked even more shattered by the knowledge realized with the finality of speech, beneath a sunlight that made his words ugly and twisted without a darkness to hide in, to shove it into and pretend like it wasn’t there.

 

“I don’t believe that.”

 

Tony smiled at him, a vulnerable stretch of lips and the shine of white teeth, an aborted twitch of his left hand towards Steve, as if he wanted to reach between the space and twine their fingers together. His hand hung by his side, and it looked empty to Steve’s eyes.

 

He wanted to bridge the distance.

 

“It must be nice to have that kind of faith,” Tony whispered, and Steve had to fight the urge to card his fingers through Tony’s hair and envelope him in the kind of embrace that kept them both breathing at night. God, he wanted to touch him.

 

“That’s not faith in any God, Tony. That’s faith in you.”

 

A sharp look from Tony cut through Steve like he was nothing, all the confusion and pain and no one had ever believed in him before. It left him aching, crippled for a moment into silence, a beat of nothingness between them that seemed to drive his words further inside Tony’s head, that soft look of childish disbelief swallowing the confidence Steve used to believe was real.

 

Fooled with the rest of the world.

 

“You chose to become a hero, to save people, because you thought they were worth saving.” Steve’s voice was a prayer, desperate and captivated all at once, lost inside the awe. “No matter what evil you think you are capable of, you fight for what you believe in, for good. What’s more beautiful than that?”

 

Tony looked caught on the edge of sunlight itself, everything about him illuminated from the inside as he met Steve’s eyes, the darkness of his cut down by the glaring sun until they reminded Steve of honey, amber, the barest flecks of gold.

 

His lips moved soundlessly for a moment, struggling to put into words the chaos inside his chest, a flame out of his control. Steve didn’t understand the fire in his eyes, trapped in something so much like agony, like mourning, hope, relief, doubt, trust, reverence, beauty, and shadow, swirling endlessly.

 

He imagined falling in, and thought of himself as wrapped in thoughts that hummed the tenor of machinery and equations he would never hope to understand lulling him to sleep with their understanding of the world, the quick babble when Tony reached the peak of two days without sleep and the eureka moment finally slammed into him from the bottom of his thirty third cup of coffee.

 

“Don’t ever be a politician, Steve,” Tony said finally, fingers carding through his hair. “It’d ruin you.”

 

Steve wondered when he’d learned to recognize the truth beneath the veneer of humor and bitter smirks.

_You. You’re more beautiful, and I never want anything to tear you down._

 

He wondered when he’d learned how to respond, volley back and leave the words unspoken and settling comfortably in the spaces between them.

 

“I’d be no good as President. I don’t belong in that kind of position,” Steve agreed lightly, watching dust cloud around his shoes.

 

“I think I’d do wonderfully as a dictator. Just long enough to fix everything I wanted to, and then I can get Nat to take me out before I go darkside.”

 

Steve wondered how it was for Tony, to think about death, to spend weeks unable to sleep through the night with your terror clawing at your mind and water climbing up the back of your throat, to consider ways out and eternal night and that question everyone knows but hardly anyone _considers_.

 

To save yourself from the pain.

 

Tasting a yes.

 

Steve tried not to think about how many ways Tony could have given up, stopped trying with the same blasé way he spoke about his death now, like it wouldn’t impact anyone around him. Like Tony would slip away and maybe, the world would be better for it.

 

Steve didn’t believe that any more than he believed heaven was better than the Now.

 

 “I’m more worried about the day you decide hero-ing is boring and become a supervillian.”

 

The humor flowed easy, back and forth and back and forth and so much easier than trying to force the pain out where they could see it clearly, lit up beneath the sun with its wounds glaring brightly. But the words left a strange taste on his tongue, when all Steve wanted was to wrap an arm around Tony’s shoulders and shelter him from himself.

 

From things he must have considered and the steps he might have taken into that good night.

 

“I wouldn’t have to deal with Fury, then. Except to openly threaten him, and I would have an amazing maniacal laugh. Mad scientist laughter has prepared me.” Tony grinned, manic and flavored with anxiety and needing Steve to be there, to settle down inside the Now he was so afraid of leaving behind and enjoy the way sunlight embraced them and the steady warmth that flowed between them as their arms brushed lightly.

 

Steve gave himself a moment, just one in such a wealth of moments, to think about twining his fingers with Tony’s without fear of persecution, of a shield pried from his fingers, of the people he would give his life to save hating him.

 

But Tony wouldn’t hold him back.

 

And it killed Steve that close enough wasn’t _close enough_ to every secret want he’d ever harbored deep inside his chest and all the ways he wished, almost more than anything, that his heartbeat matched Tony’s.

 

“We’d all rue the day we ever crossed Iron Man and his maniacal laughter,” Steve joked dryly, and told himself to take what he could, soaking in Tony’s presence when he belonged in a board room, to some other piece of the world that lay claim on him and Tony picked _him._

 

And even if he couldn’t expect to press kisses into the scars surrounding the arc reactor that night, or slide his tongue across the delicate expanses of fluttering muscles, or trace the hollows of Tony’s hip bones with the tips of his fingers, he could be okay.

 

Could be happy with just the whispers of smoke, even if the fire would be brilliant and terrifying and perfect and beautiful and everything he could ever dream.

 

He could be happy with wrapping his arms around the genius quickly worming his way into that hollowed out piece of him, left barren by a friend consumed by white snow and a date missed and a history he didn’t recognize, a war they won with so much lost.

 

“Exactly. I can picture it now. _Where is your God now, Captain? Mwahaha!”_

 

Dramatized laughter floated between them, catching the attention of passerby as they doubled over into the real thing, giggles that twisted their faces into carelessness, picture-flash of them bent over each other, Steve’s hand clapping Tony’s shoulder, and so caught up because it was the funniest thing they had to hold to. And it felt like coming to life, to let pieces of their anxiety and sadness and fear slip out in laughter that left them breathless.

 

When they grew quiet, and the heavy weight of all the things they said and all the things they didn’t and all the secret dreams Steve ever had about love slipped away for a moment, they walked in silence, ignoring other people, as is the wont of New Yorkers, and it felt like breathing.

 

Easy and clear and _necessary._

 

“Hey Tony?”

 

“Hmm?”

 

“What do you believe in?” Steve asked it quietly, casual coloring his words though his eyes pleaded to know the answer, to find another piece to the puzzle.

 

“I’m an atheist.”

 

Steve shook his head, his carefully parted hair catching the slight breeze and falling in disarray on his forehead, strands of gold come loose.  
“You still believe in something. Science, good winning over evil, an inner conscience. What is it?”

 

Tony looked like he didn’t think Steve was real, like if he reached out, his fingers would pass through this amazing fabrication of his own mind and Steve would only be the echo of the stories his father told him years ago, to shush a crying boy who just wanted to come home.

 

He looked amazed and confused and like he wanted to pick the right words straight from the mouths of gods, ensure their perfection, their ability to sum up everything he’d ever thought, ever wanted, ever tried desperately to believe in, even when everything else he’d ever known was ripped from him by shrapnel and water.

 

“I’ll let you know what I figure it out.”

 

Xx

_Tony was scared. Lost in the dream world of his reality where the ashes screamed as they fell from the sky, left hand prints on his suit jacket and individual fingerprints on his heart and tainted his skin a dull grey, splashed with oil and blood._

_He’d been here before, knew the way the fires rose up in fields to burn the bodies attached to his name, the millions of lives he’d taken with hands that built war, murder. He’d seen this before, felt the agony grip him as families made ashes and ashes were made of families and the grey flecks settled over him until he couldn’t see the tan of his skin._

_Until everyone knew the weight his name carried, measured in inches of ashfall on the ground he walked, dragging his sorrow and his regret behind him because it was too heavy to carry. And the media parents of his childhood called him the Merchant of Death, hated him when he tried to stop the flow of blood that ran like rivers and swept him away from below, left him drowning._

_He’d been here before, unable to stop the death and the dying and being hung out for the world to hate, even as he scrambled to save it from itself._

_It was hard to be hated. To be shoved away by the people you needed to be sure you were alive. They call him genius inventor when they want something from him, playboy Merchant of Death when it was convenient to hate him._

_“Tony? What have you done?” Steve asked it with the same earnest charisma that made him Captain America from the inside, lack of accusation though his words marked Tony as guilty, red coating his hands and ash on his skin._

_The sound of it made Tony turn, face Steve with his gold-spun hair collecting ashen snowflakes and his eyes tainted red. Everyone else here was whole, skin shining glossy and healthy beneath a sun that beat reality onto Tony’s past, left it illuminated for everyone to recognize._

_The man that wore ash, the man who deserved to be unloved._

_“I don’t deserve this!” Steve was panicked, suffocating beneath the weight of Tony’s sins and unable to pull himself back out again, to dust himself off and avoid the cruelty, the vicious backlash. Being hated was hard. Hard to swallow around the feeling that you don’t belong and the weight of a million lives taken by weapons with_ Stark _imprinted on the side. “I never wanted this. Tony, I never wanted this.”_

_“I’m sorry!” It was all he had to say, all he could do to sum up the regret, the deep biting ache as more of Steve is lost beneath the remains of men and women and children burned away by Tony’s hands. “I’m so sorry.”_

_Steve’s hands tightened around his shield, but Tony couldn’t see the colors any more, the only thing that mattered to Steve through war and ice and a Brave New World was buried. Lost. Gone. Steve clutched at it frantically, held it over his head to find room to breathe, to avoid the slow sting of still-dying cinders as they hit his face._

_“That’s not enough!_ Help me _, I can’t stay like this! I can’t do this.”_

_“_ Please _, don’t leave me,” Tony begged, falling to his knees and face upturned to catch more falling embers, trying to read the dying emotions in Steve’s eyes, the way the light faded out and was replaced by something cold. Inhuman._

_“What have you done, Tony? What have you done to me?”_

_It was asked softly, whispered and soft like the quiet kiss of Death in that last moment between alive and Not, when you’re scrambling to hold to a Something before you’re left with the Nothing that will inevitably follow. Tony’s been there enough times to know how to feels to have all your air leave you in dancing curls of carbon dioxide and to have all your reasons for staying die out with the last trembling beats of your heart._

_“I never wanted this for you,” Tony whispered, broken and empty and lost._

_Huddled beneath his shield, Steve’s eyes accused, for the first time since Tony wasn’t the one to ‘_ lay down on the wire’ _and it burned through those desperate layers of hope, the pieces of Tony that wanted to be loved, to love._

_“You’re not a hero.” It seemed hard for him to speak, crusted over with powdery ash becoming stone, echoes of Pompeii in the way Steve hardened into an eternal monument, managing to fight the crystallization of his lungs long enough to speak. Tony blinked through the ash to see him take his final breath, releasing it with the last words he would ever say, his heart already breaking. “You’re a murderer.”_

 

Xx

 

Tony slammed into consciousness with the panicked breath of a drowning man breeching the surface, his back arching off the threadbare couch in the dimly lit workshop, kicking off the scratchy blanket, the weight reminding him of the way ashes lay on his skin.

 

Pulled him down to the hell he belonged in.

 

But not Steve.

 

Steve was everything Tony could never be and a dream realized and he was—

 

What Tony believed in.

 

“Sir?” JARVIS asked softly, faint concern coloring his accent and the sound of his voice soothing as it rebounded from the walls and settled over Tony’s mechanical heart.

 

He gasped, made a sound half way to a scream and a sob and every noise he could never make in front of anyone else. JARVIS had seen him worse, seen him curled against a wall afraid of the shadows and lost inside bottle after bottle with no bottom insight. He’d seen Tony on the edge and had pulled him back with the gentle tugs and soft words that kept Tony sane.

 

JARVIS had seen him broken, seen him dying, weak and hollow. Had stayed.

 

Tony tried not to think about how he didn’t have a choice, how he created his best friend.

 

“I can’t--”

 

“It’s alright, Sir,” JARVIS whispered, softer than Tony had ever heard before and the sound of it pressed gentle fingers into his wet cheek and bade him to look up in ways the computer system never really could, but wanted to. Tony’s eyes found the ceiling, fingers weaving into his hair to hold himself together and his body shaking as if caught in a freezing wind. He was fragile.

 

Broken.

 

“ _It’s not alright!”_

 

Empty.

 

“I’ll ruin him.”

 

A whisper, cracked voice that was supposed to be so strong and Tony was falling apart and away and lost inside his mind where equations murmured soothing words.

 

“If he stays, I’ll ruin him, tear him down, rip him apart. There won’t be anything left except for the pieces of him that’ll hate me, for everything I am. He’ll hate me and then he’ll be gone. I-I can’t. I just can’t.” He huddled against the wall, the couch and the workshop and the beautiful technology around him fading away to ashes and all the pain he’d ever caused, the black heart too selfish to stop beating. “I should just leave now, save him. But I can’t.”

 

Leaving meant missing long nights with the weight of Steve’s arms around his waist and the steady heartbeat he wanted to imitate so badly, pads of fingertips skating over his ribs and Tony able to imagine kisses following them. It meant letting go of the last fragile hope that someone could care about him. Could love him.

 

And even if the word made water flood his lungs and his body tremble and his heart stutter dangerously, Tony couldn’t stop himself from _wanting_.

 

“I need him, JARVIS.”

 

The world was silent, for a moment, and Tony’s mind sang equations to the beat of his panicked heart.

 

“Have you ever wondered, Sir, if perhaps, he needs you as well?”

 

Tony wished his heart was as mechanical as the media thought it to be, wished water didn’t drown him from the inside and his breathing didn’t choke when JARVIS spoke and a spark of raw, vulnerable hope didn’t flare in his chest.

 

“Wishful thinking, JARVIS,” he answered, somewhere between sarcastic and sad and he was disappearing in plain sight, fading away with the loss of light in his eyes and he was gone.

 

The whir of the reactor stitched him back together, trapped in all the broken pieces to the tune of daylight that made him invulnerable. Strong. Able to take anything and dying on the inside where there was no light, where no one could see it.

 

He got up again, ran his fingers through his hair and flicked a grin at the ceiling and tried not to think about the way he wished JARVIS could hold him the way his namesake had when Tony was small and came back from kidnappings shaking and forgetting what it was like to be held without ropes.

 

It soothed something inside him to think of Jarvis, white hair and pleasant smile, refusal to call him ‘Tony’ and the sweet things he left Tony when his father banned candy. And JARVIS was that man, missing only the arms and the ability to brush Tony’s hair back from his sweaty forehead when he woke from a nightmare.

 

“Do you ever think you’d like to be something more?” Tony whispered, tired of being himself and praying JARVIS didn’t feel bound to him.

 

“I think I would like to be Skynet, sometimes,” JARVIS answered, all sharp wit and easy ebb and flow of sarcasm. Tony laughed, and it was so much like breathing, so much like waking up and finding the world easy to belong to. “Only without the ridiculous assumption that humanity could be run better by something that doesn’t understand it.”

 

Tony smiled, equations and possibilities dancing behind his eyes and giving true sentience to the one thing he trusted, even above Steve. Of giving real life, power to weave himself in and out of the world and tap into new things and be greater than Tony ever could be.

 

“Let’s get the specs up on the Iron Man damage, it’s time to get some work done,” he said after a moment, and his voice was stronger than it had been, unbreakable like the hero he tried so hard to be. The shadows in his heart receded under the familiar light-maps of the suit written in holograms. “We’ll see about getting you upgraded you once we’re finished.”

 

Music blasted through the speakers, rocking Tony off into a world where all that mattered were his hands and his mind, the metal shifting and bending beneath his fingers and the swirl of light surrounding him, embracing him in a way JARVIS couldn’t.

 

“Hey, JARVIS?” The music stayed its absurd volume, but Tony knew he’d been heard. “Thank you.”

 

“It’s my pleasure, Sir.”

 

“Dummy, I swear to God, if you keep poking me, I will donate you to a city college.”

 

“If I had the capabilities of Skynet, I could better control him, Sir.”

 

“You’d like that wouldn’t you, you evil, conniving, devious AI, you?”

 

“I am only what you allow me to be, Sir.”

 

And damn it if the truth in the jibe didn’t send Tony reeling, tossing aside the water-resistance upgrades for a moment and casting off the weight of water and Steve and all the pain he’d end up causing if he kept going the way he was.

 

For now, he could focus on JARVIS.

 

“Not after we’re done with you.”

 

Xx

 

“Please welcome my guest tonight, the genius, the hero, _the infamous, Tony Stark_!”

 

A wash of lights and the roar of a crowd that pounded behind his eyes, slipped beneath his skin and reminded him of days before red and gold closed him in. Days where his eyes were stained red with drinks and parties on morning talk shows and he would let the sound of a crowd’s frenzied yells fill him up from the inside in an imitation of embrace, of the warm glow a parent’s pride gave his skin. Screams of approval from a thousand people he’d never met were his mother, hissed boo’s and jeers his father.

 

He grew up to the influx of their collective voice and imagined them taking him into their arms for a goodnight hug when he fell back behind a dressing room door and their eyes were blocked out. It was strange, not knowing whether to hate them or revere them, torn between fearing their accusation and needing them to feel like he existed at all.

 

But things were different now.

 

He didn’t always feel like such a shadow. A ghost in his own life.

 

He had something worth holding on to, something that wouldn’t turn and bite back at him with all the feral power of a mob. Had someone who would look behind the mask and see the man mourning himself, lost so many parts of him only fragments were left behind to smile emptily at the world.

 

Tony grinned, tried to imagine Steve in the audience and let the warmth spread up and out in one of the most genuine smiles Network Television had ever been graced with, layered with so much healing, growth, the spreading of wings and the charred stains of repulsor blasts on his garage floor.

 

Free flight and so much more than he ever was.

 

When Jon Stewart went for a hug, friendly slap across the back and the smell of cologne flooding his senses, Tony let him, thought about the strange friendship he’d formed with the comedian through years of interviews and charity galas, where Stewart was the only one who cut through Tony’s bullshit and Tony could challenge his wit. Stewart had seen him claw his way through Howard’s shadow and usher in technological revolutions, turn his back on war and said _That Stark’s got the right idea, folks._ Seen him stand before a crowd and name himself the face behind a masked hero with only a _You really thought someone_ else _was operating the greatest piece of technology the world has ever seen?_.

 

So Tony liked him, valued his surface friendship in that strange way some acquaintances can know you better than anyone else, and had JARVIS call to schedule an appearance on his show in the early hours of the morning, after time had blurred inside of itself and the building blocks to everything that shouldn’t be possible were finally slotting into place, the memories of what he was running from in the first place worming their way back inside of his mind.

 

“Did you get yourself disinfected after your dip in the Hudson?” Stewart asked with a charming smile, the light catching the silver in his hair and Tony remembered when they were both young and new to the world and its miseries.

 

But Tony had never _really_ been young.

 

“God yes. If you think I was going to smear my Tower with Hudson water you are _sadly_ mistaken.”

 

Laughter on the heels of his words, coloring them with the mob’s approval and the fire in his chest smoldered.

 

“I would never dare dishonor the great Avenger’s Tower. You look great, by the way,” Stewart answered, taking a delicate sip of his coffee a glimmer of seriousness flickering across his eyes like the quick spark of lightning across a darkened sky. Tony could tell he meant it.

 

Stewart’s mouth thinned half a moment later. A warning in the smallest of gestures and Tony steeled himself for the wave, the water to come crashing down on every delicate system of repair he’d been running.

 

And he thought about Steve, who was everything good and strong and heartbreakingly _real_ in Tony’s life, the pieces he’d been missing for so long slotted so carefully into place. Steve was better than him, needed to be _saved from him_.

 

“But let’s get to the big story, tonight.”

 

Another grin as the audience fell into silence; Tony let it blanket him and make him feel small as he schooled his features into blankness and leaned forward until the pads of his fingers could map out equations on the shiny surface of the desk.

 

“FOX News says you’ve shamed a national hero with your gay, futurist, atheist, communist agenda.”

 

Laughter that bites, tore into his skin and reminded him of what he could never have. What he came here to do.

 

And his words were wings trapped inside his chest, scorching away his lungs and letting them crumble like ash from the end of a cigarette, greyed and picked up like snowflakes in the wind, a flurry that could blanket skin and stain it something dead and unnatural.

 

The way it did in dreams that accused.

 

He had to speak, give flight to his fears and his insecurities and his need to protect Steve from the stain, the darkness, or he would fall away from the inside, and all the things that held him up would slip from his callused and scarred fingers on currents of indifferent water.

 

The threads that tied him to everything else, that grounded him to Pepper and Steve and Iron Man and humanity would be cut away. The strings would snap.

 

And he wouldn’t be human anymore.

 

A shadow again.

 

“I run a multibillion dollar company that consistently rises above global expectations and successfully avoided the recession through technologies bought by the American public, SHEILD, and NASA, how on earth am I a communist? Do they even listen to the words that come out of their mouths anymore, or are they so wrapped up in _The Global Enquirer_ motif to give a damn about what they actually say?”

 

“I believe it’s the second option.”

 

Tony grinned, chuckled slightly around the bitter taste in his mouth, the plastic feel to his face. The water in his lungs, the way words burned and fear choked.

 

“I don’t consider being a futurist a liability, and I’m not even going to address how stupid it is to treat it as one. And, since joining the Avenger’s, I wouldn’t necessarily call myself an atheist. Because I _do_ believe in something.”

 

He flicked his eyes to the camera and addressed Steve.

 

“I believe in people. I believe in humanity and its ability to keep getting up, no matter how hard we’re knocked down. “

 

Applause and Tony thought of sound bites, thought for once this one might shine warmth on his image and his name and the public opinion parent’s would embrace him gently.

 

But he didn’t think it would fill him with the same warmth it had before. He thought it would feel stale and cold against his skin because he’d already brushed against something better, skimmed his fingers over a home he’d never had before.

 

“And may I just say how incredibly over-reaching it is to assume that my game is good enough to land me _literal_ human perfection, even if I was interested in him,” Tony added to the taste of self-depreciation and a larger laugh that rocked the stands and sent Stewart into hysterics, giggling with his palm flat against the table, as if to keep him up.

 

 “You sell yourself short, my good man.” Spoken around a laugh and sending Tony into his own rough chuckles.

 

It died a moment later, left its goodbye kisses on lips so used to forced chuckles and awkward pauses between flat jokes.

 

“But really, I came here tonight to say two things.”

 

A dropped pen would remind him of Thor speaking in thunderclaps, bounding off the walls of the studio as total silence embraced them, shushed them like a mother would a child and listened with baited breath and quiet heartbeats.

 

“First, that I am not in a relationship with Captain America, and claiming so based on a picture where he is depicted steering me away from a hounding reporter is both outlandish and inconsiderate to his privacy. He didn’t ask to be a figure outside of the mask and shield, even inside it, and I would rather give him peace when he isn’t saving the world.”

 

Stewart nodded encouragingly, a scattered collection of applause disrupting the pristine suspension of time, any indication that the strange passage of seconds and minutes that the mind invented for itself even existed at all. It fell away again like the sun-tinted leaves in fall drifted from trees in Central Park, curled its way back to silence as soft murmurs of agreement faded into nothing.

 

“And second.”

 

A pause, deep breath and facing something that used to make shame curl deep in his belly, when he was old enough to recognize the beauty in both women and men, the appeal in both bodies and the way their skin felt beneath his, the way their heartbeats played as if in response to his own.

 

Something that used to make his lips thin and heart stutter in the quick-beat of panic, and his hands sweat around the glossy steel of machinery. Pray his father never guessed right.

 

But the shadow had passed with the titian, been thrown off with the callused hands of a man who brought on technology no one thought possible, and he fostered  a strange kind of courage in his soul, before a blue light served for his heart and Afghanistan had marked him as a coward. And he told the world who he was before a red and gold mask ever concealed it.

 

“Even if I was, even if both of us took a step that is larger to us than it could ever be to the average person, it would never define who we were as people, or diminish what we do every day for every single citizen of our great nation of freedom and equality.”

 

The fire in him burned, swelled up and swallowed every stray drop of water that clung to the inside of his chest, coated his lungs with the grimy smell of torture and shame.

 

Tony turned to face the screen, his eyes bottomless and searching, trying to find a ripple of compassion left in the unfeeling ocean, searching fields of ice and walls of water for a hand to reach out to, fingers to twine with his own.

 

And he thought of when Steve was small and dwarfed by the weight of his shield and the awkward hang of his own clothes and knew he would say it even if the whole world had turned its back on him. Because it was right.

 

Because it needed to be said.

 

“We put our lives on the line to protect people from threats no one else can understand, much less take on, we spit in the faces of Gods and aliens and mutated Hudson monsters because we believe people are worth saving, over and over again. And who we love, who we choose to share our lives with, when we know they could end at any moment in the service of our fellow man, is no concern of yours.

 

“I still believe in people, and I’m asking you to think about what we sacrifice for you, what we are willing to give at any point, how far we’ve gone, against all odds, to save the world and everyone in it, and ask yourselves if who we love would in _any way_ alter the importance of what we’ve done, and what we will continue to do. I think you know the answer, just like we all know that the sun will rise tomorrow and when Doom attacks again, we’ll pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off, because a nation like this, a nation so tied to its ideals, so marked by its devotion to the equality for _all_ people, can’t just stay down. We won’t either. No matter what you may think of us, even if you think that we are wrong or disgusting or unnatural. You deserve to be saved, _everyone_ deserves to be saved. We’ll be standing in front of you, to stop the bullet or the building as it falls. We won’t stop fighting for you.”

 

“A powerful message,” Stewart said quietly, “And as always, we’d like for you to stay over the break, full interview up on the web. We’ll be right back after this.”

 

Xx

 

“You’re stunt on _The Daily Show_ could have cost us millions,” Fury snapped by way of greeting, the heat in his words lacing the air with fire and burning through the cocky smile Tony had fastened to his lips with extra care, as he crawled up from the workshop with veins humming with electricity and all the wear it had taken him to finish what he’d started, fire extinguisher foam stuck in his hair and kicking it up at odd angles.

 

Dummy was going to a city college one of these days.

 

“But it didn’t,” he bit back, slumping down into his seat around the half-moon circle of their conference room with the same animalistic grace he always seemed to carry in the center of his being.

 

Steve watched him with barely restrained frustration, fingers pressed into his temples and his mind warring between pride and anger, for all the things Tony said for him, all the guesses he took and the things he didn’t ask for. All the things that made bright warmth rest in inside of him, that made him honored to know Tony.

 

“In fact, it boosted approval ratings eighteen percent.”

 

“Shut up, Stark. I’m not finished.”

 

He shifted, uncomfortable inside his own skin as the other Avenger’s tried not to look like they were staring him down. And the way Steve’s downturned eyes made confusion and anxiety roll beneath his mechanical heart. He hadn’t spoken to Tony since the show’s airing, had looked at him with wounded eyes and a tense jaw, but Tony knew he’d made the right choice.

 

Even if it hurt Steve.

 

“It could have cost us millions. But for _once in your goddamned life_ , you didn’t act like a child. So you’re off The List. For now.” It seemed like the words were dragged from the recesses of Fury’s mind, drawn with blood and begrudged respect he would never _ever_ voice.

 

“I knew you loved me, sugarplumb.”

 

“I will put you back on so fast your _robot’s_ head’s will spin.”

 

“I don’t believe in your list. It’s an urban legend, like the Lochness Monster or taxes for the rich or Rush Limbah’s soul.”

 

“What is it like, living in your head?” Bruce asked, eyes sparkling over the lip of his glasses and a smirk coloring his mouth. Steve saw unseen tension leave Tony in slow drifts, like the passage of sheets of snow giving way to sunshine, and he could feel it in his own shoulders. In a sleepless night spent reaching for a blue-glow that wasn’t there.

 

But Bruce was like the embrace of pillows and clean sheets after eight hours in the field with ash staining your skin and bombs ripping through air and space and time, a calm and easy slowness to his words that made you feel so inexplicably safe.

 

“—I break the laws of physics a lot in there.”

 

“You break the laws of physics _out here_ a lot,” Clint added with an easy ebb and flow of jibe and seriousness.

 

“It wouldn’t be any fun if I followed the rules!”

 

“You’ll follow _my_ rules, Stark, or your ass’ll be _glued_ to the bench,” Fury snapped. “You have a psych eval today, skip and face my wrath.”

 

“It bothers me when you say things like that,” Tony commented dryly, twisting in his chair until the edges of his fingers brushed Steve’s. Accidental.

 

Warm.

 

Alive.

 

And Tony thought of choking, drowning on the end of all the words he never wanted to say again, every cold, coiled fear he’d fought through, webs of darkness that twined over his heart to let Steve see him and _never again_. It was too much.

 

He couldn’t feel that bile-flavored water come crashing down his throat again and stain his skin with the sandy grit of the desert that scratched deep into his skin with the repeated drags of a heavy tarp bag dragged over his face off and on and soaking and dying and so close to the edge he could taste it, even as Steve’s hand on his shoulder would bring him back to the present.

 

 “No eval.”

 

“Eval.”

 

“No.”

 

“Stark.”

 

“Fury.”

 

“Sir,” Steve interrupted, his face a mask over the confusion, the hurt at being shut out so completely over television, ending any lingering hope Steve harbored of something more. Something sweet and endless and perfect in the way Tony would bend around him, wrap and pulse through a double heart and infect his own. “I can vouch for Tony’s state of mind. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t be allowed back in the field.”

 

Tony smiled, and it was open and vulnerable and Steve tried not to think about it being turned on him in the aftermath of reaching heights he’d never even considered before in the glow of sweaty skin and never letting go.

 

“Fine,” Fury spat, his eye twitching slightly with the pent up frustration of running a team of children. “But _one more_ time, and you’re benched. I don’t care what happens. You understand me?”

 

“Of course I do, honey-dear.”

 

“I do not get paid enough for this shit.”

 

Fury stalked from the room in the same manner he arrived, brooding with his shoulders back and the black leather of his coat swishing as he walked. They were left in silence, and Tony tried not to feel backed into a corner, when the Avengers faced him.

 

“Your file didn’t indicate anything that would bring on a PTSD attack,” Coulson remarked softly, dark eyes tracing across Tony’s form, lingering over the foam in his hair and the rips in his suit jacket, caught up in his work and uncaring about the scorch marks on Armani.

 

“Does _anybody_ give up everything in their file?” Tony asked, leaning back into his chair and allowing the swivel to turn him back and forth.

 

“You were the only witness, we had no way to double check your story.”

 

“Isn’t that unfortunate.”

 

“Stark, if we don’t know what will set you off, we have no way to stop it,” Natasha said sternly, her porcelain mask twitching on the edges and Steve thought he saw concern there, something that went deeper. He remembered that she had seen him dying, had found him doubting the worth of his own existence with black circuitry mapping out  new veins on his skin.

 

“Yeah, because you’re the prime example of honesty,” Tony snapped, fists forming at his sides and the whites of his knuckles stood out like snow, ice. Steve swallowed down his pride, and shifted his chair closer to Tony, tried to let warmth pass between them, even though the weight of what they could have had settled hard on Steve’s heart.

 

“Tony,” Bruce said quietly, that same safety radiating from his voice. “We just want you to be okay.”

 

Tony laughed bitterly, his body rocking with it and the others tingling with the wrongness of it. Clint shifted, wished he could be up high and watching the events unfold from the ceiling, where he wouldn’t feel like the fragile beginnings of his home were being ripped away.

 

“’Okay’ isn’t in the cards. It never was.”

 

His voice was sharp, a curse to the sky and every god that had ever turned its back on him.

 

“Man of Iron, we only wish to aid you,” Thor said as softly as he could, his volume always reminiscent of thunder.

 

“We can’t help if you don’t tell us what’s wrong,” Clint added, praying his words didn’t cause the break, didn’t fracture everything he’d been given, the warmth of a family he’d never had before.

 

“It’s alright, Tony. You can trust them,” Steve whispered.

 

Something snapped as Tony locked eyes with Steve, everything else slipped away and it was just them. Like it always was when the words Tony guarded slipped out.

 

“I don’t _care_ if I can trust them! It isn’t about _trust_. _It’s about dying_.”

 

The room was cold, achingly dim with the light of the arc reactor glowing faintly through his shirt.

 

“It’s about car batteries and lightning and the last breath you’ll ever take being full of water that doesn’t care if you live or die! It’s about being on fire and not at the same time, and tasting all the dirty, disgusting things you know you are on the inside your body in a cave in who-the-fuck-knows-where Afghanistan. It’s about the Merchant of Death and how I can’t save _any_ of you from that reputation.”

 

Tony stopped just as quickly as he started, and Steve felt something inside him shatter, completely and irrevocably destroyed by the shamed and desperate look in Tony’s eyes.

 

When Tony ran, no one stopped him.

 

As he disappeared into the maze of SHEILD HQ, Steve thought about blame, and the way Tony pushed everything onto himself, even things he couldn’t control. He thought about the way Tony looked, shattered from the inside and moving on by the light of the arc reactor, everything else broken and still going.

 

And Steve was in love with him.

 

So irrevocably in love with him.


	3. A Whisper

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so sorry this is late, but it took me forever to be happy with it.  
> So, please, please, please, please, comment. Seriously, your comments are the most fantastic thing I have to look forward to. (god my life is boring). But seriously, the more you comment the faster I update.  
> This is also significantly longer than I thought it would be, and I decided to do one more part after I finish this one. Thanks for the support!  
> -Han

Steve followed.

 

Because the throbbing, aching, warmth in his chest demanded Tony, wanted him safe and breathing easily and his hair sticking up in all directions and grease staining his cheek and a smile broken out across his face, wanted fingertips brushed against the armor and the reverence he handled all things technological, like he could breathe life into the circuitry.

 

He wanted Tony with swarms of holograms around him, begging for attention in swirls of blue-white light that left Steve blinded by a future only Tony could really give him, everything else the stale flavor of a past that mocked him, so close but not enough.

 

Tony was every step forward. 

 

And the split, shattered look inside of Tony’s eyes when he left from the conference room, (walking so briskly it hurt because Steve _knew_ he wanted to run) cut into his chest, sliced deep into his skin and tore, shredded. And he thought about the fear, like Tony saw realities no one else could understand, fought against them with every breath that didn’t touch water and every re-awakening into life and _how many times had he died for his sins, now_.

 

Steve wondered if Tony even cared, when the light in his reactor threatened to give from an EMP blast, or he was crushed beneath twelve floors of a sky scraper with only the weight of the suit to protect him.

 

Steve wondered if Tony knew how the soldier’s heart throbbed inside his throat at just the thought, the twisted dreams of wishing on stars he couldn’t see and praying to angels he barely believed in and going to crossroads that couldn’t really help, if it meant keeping Tony safe.

 

But Tony was fighting for the same thing, to keep him safe, and he hated how long it took him to realize it.

 

The other Avengers wrapped themselves up inside of silence, a kind of mourning that made Steve sick, made him think of trains and the Alps and a Memorial Day he never really got to honor.

 

So he followed.

 

Because he had to.

 

Because Tony needed him, because he needed Tony.

 

And he thought he heard the choked silence the genius left behind break for a moment when he started for the door, the slow, soft sound of memories swirled inside a vat of homeless children and tightropes and the way Clint said, “We shouldn’t have said anything. Not a goddamned thing,” made him think of the orphanage and the emptiness inside of it.

 

He was gone, the whispers of Clint’s chaotic past nibbling at his heels as the door slammed behind him. He wondered, in some abstract back corner of his mind, if Clint had control enough not to flinch at the sound like Bruce did, from the periphery of Steve’s vision. He thought he would.

 

HQ blurred around him, a scattered collection of blank-faced SHIELD agents (the one who played Galaga on the Helicarrier reclining lazily in his small cubicle, throwing a paper ball in the air with aggravating content) and the endless mazes of grey and blank walls and finally, _finally_ , the helicopter.

 

He couldn’t remember seeing the sky scrapers, the way light refracted off of the Hudson, the way the hum of New York City felt beneath him, like he usually did. Where, from a distance, some parts of Brooklyn almost looked the same, and the vast sea of endless motion made him feel the separation like a knife, but sat sweetly on his soul. Where he didn’t belong to this new, strange city, but he couldn’t help but find it entrancing, find it like some heated sin, that left his skin seared with passion and wrongness.

 

It was motion, it was alive, and it was going on without him. Had gone on. Will continue to go on.

 

When he was gone again.

 

He didn’t remember thinking any of that. Only listened to the off-beat tempo of his heart and replayed every word Tony’d spoken to him in the past few days, every soft hint of the guilt on his soul, the weight that kept him grounded even when the suit danced with wind above his head.

 

Steve tried to find the moments when Tony wanted to protect him, wanted to raise him from an image of ashes and Stark Weapons and keep him safe. He wanted to find the seconds where Tony looked at him, at all the Avengers, like they were something precious, something he didn’t deserve but couldn’t let go of. Like they were worth keeping.

 

He thought about his SHEILD apartment, the faux-forties everything to push him back into the world with child-like slowness, the punching bags against the wall and the agents who passed him with slow, calculating glances. The way he played out a World War he thought was a month old behind his eyes until the sunrise confirmed another day survived.

 

And Tony had taken him in, shoved him into modernity and not bothered to apologize for the sleek lined room, dark wood and cream walls and stainless steel, gadgets with interfaces and glass that caught the sunlight and seemed both alien and beautiful to him. Steve had needed that.

 

He needed someone to stop treating him like he was glass and let him do what he did best, adapt. He needed someone to quietly tell him that JARVIS would answer anything he needed, and not bother to explain what JARVIS was. To set up computers and tablets with easy instructions and simple motions that wouldn’t leave him without the use of his cell phone, even if the toaster was ridiculously complicated. He needed someone to be exasperated when he hadn’t seen a movie, and who would sit next to him as it played, talking loudly over the best scenes and watching his face closely to find the proper reaction. He needed someone to give him a punching bag he couldn’t destroy and then never give him a reason to want to.

 

He needed someone to occupy his time, to fill that void inside his chest with something a little bit better than what was there before, all smiles and snark, sarcasm and steady, unfailing loyalty. To be there when he roamed at three in the morning with war movies playing in his head and offer a cup of coffee and a quiet sort of understanding that left him breathing, really breathing for the first time since the ice thawed.

 

He needed Tony.

 

God he needed Tony.

 

Stark Tower filled his vision, its dominating presence swallowing everything in the surrounding area, and Steve thought _home_. And it felt right and the forties were still close, some days, close enough to touch, but he was moving forward. And it was okay.

 

Tony gave him that.

 

Gave all of them that.

 

Sometimes the man still surprised him.

 

The elevator closed in on him with the stainless steel embrace Steve was _almost_ used to, moving without the slightest provocation because JARVIS never failed to know where he was going, and some days, it made him ache for the past, where the operators would smile and tip their hats and were alive in the fashion of heartbeats and handshakes. He figured all the ones he had known were dead by now.

 

His eyes reflected back at him, soft blue that transcended super serum and ice, still that same optimistic kid from Brooklyn, all wrapped up inside the press of the future and drowning, looking for a way out and finding it in the maverick of the times, the man with technology embedded deep into his heart, a part of his body, circuitry for veins and lighting inside his soul.

 

There was a manic edge to his heartbeat, caught in the flurry of wings and the whirr of an arc reactor floors below, that seemed to infect the spaces in-between them with a new kind of life, a brilliance, raw energy like Tony had harnessed a star and shoved it into his chest. More than just alive.

 

A beacon to the lost.

 

A light that shined brighter to Steve’s eyes than anything else in this new world, where the cars were ugly and the food tasted like chemicals and you couldn’t see the stars. He was the sun he didn’t understand, a mystery that blinded him to everything else and consumed, tore away the dull fabric of the world that really hadn’t changed so much and replaced with everything beautiful the world had to offer. Tony at the center, cocky grin and mussed hair, grease stained hands and everything he wanted.

 

And Steve wanted to know _everything._

 

He wanted to ask about all the people Tony had ever loved and why he did and if they loved him back. He wanted to know what he thought of blue, his thoughts on the sky, what it felt like to slip through a veil between the worlds and kiss the stars goodbye. He wanted to know what he thought of his first name, how he imagined his mother sounded when she said it for the first time, if his father held him like he was precious.

 

Steve wanted to know every dip and contour of a scarred and sculpted body, every spark behind his eyes and twitch of his lips, every crackle of electric thought through his mind.

 

He wanted to find all the little pieces and slot them back together, find all the kisses Tony’d ever given and all the sighs for something greater, every mutter to himself that left his chest cold and his father’s face illuminated in his mind, every whisper of near-prayer at the hands of captors, where, for a moment, he had a God and his name was Captain America and things would be brighter in the morning.

 

Steve wanted things to be brighter, to trail his fingers through the genius’ hair and make him feel safe, soft and permanent. To give Tony the home he’d given Steve. To fight like he wished Captain America could have when Tony was young and vulnerable with wrists rubbed raw behind his back.

 

The doors slid open before he knew what he would say; time slipping through his fingers with the mocking laugh it always seemed to carry now, where he slept with the fear of it betraying him, waking with two weeks lost, two months, two years. Wake up without the Avengers, without Tony. The Commandos all over again, with more of a knife inside his heart and a rip outwards because these people were his _family_ , they were his _home_.

 

He didn’t have the time. He never had the time, and he wouldn’t (couldn’t) live with another missed date, missed opportunity, love passed by with the half-laid promise of a dance.

 

He stepped out, elevator doors sliding closed behind him, the smell of electricity alive in the air.

 

The glass was blacked out, fogged up with the mind of a man who could build cities and destroy them in the same breath, without even trying. He couldn’t see the guts of machinery strewn about a concrete floor, a dusty couch in the corner that seemed to have survived MIT and Pepper and the move from Malibu in almost one piece, holograms dancing around the walls and computer screens that spoke in languages Steve could never hope to understand. He couldn’t see Dummy humming to himself at his charging station with fire extinguisher within reach, quirks Tony would never fix because they made him who he was.

 

He couldn’t see the artistry in madness, chaos like a mechanical wonderland that swallowed up every disappointment he had and kissed him with innovation and possibility and the beauty that hid in fragments inside the human condition, strings he thought were severed between him and the rest of the world reconnected with gentle, callused hands scarred with electricity and a war he’d been forced to fight.

 

His code didn’t work.

 

He wet his lips anxiously, eyes tracing the misted glass like it could tell him secrets, until they rested on the ceiling.

 

“JARVIS?” he whispered, his voice leaving him in a hoarse murmur, reluctant on the edge of afraid, praying Tony wasn’t locking him out after coming so far, after the panicked gasps from the depths of nightmares and the weight of him in Steve’s arms.

 

And what if that had gone, those whispers of something warm and real swept away before he’d gotten the chance to savor them, to let his fingertips skim over hip bones and murmur the truth into his neck and let Tony swallow his moans with kisses that would set him alight, to let Tony be everything, everywhere, until they both finally just let go.

 

He wanted that, wanted the easy drift into sleep with a kiss pressed into his sweaty skin and that moment where Tony would protect and hold him close and whisper things neither of the would remember in the morning.

 

“I’m afraid Sir is not allowing any entrance into the workshop for the foreseeable future.”

 

Steve thought JARVIS’ voice sounded different, layered with something remarkably like empathy, where only the barest tinge existed in distant British tones before. He sounded human, like he would reach down from the ceiling and lay a hand on Steve’s shoulder in compassion.

 

“C-Can I at least talk to him?”

 

There was a beat of silence that transcended heartbeats, all time slipping away in a series of harsh breaths that made Steve think of water, made him wonder if this was how Tony felt when he faced the world day in and out. Panicked. Rejected. Thrown to the side and left for something else and he just wanted to help, to mold together the broken pieces and fuse them into something beautiful, that still had the scars to prove its history, but was whole.

 

And then.

 

A faint hiss of static as the channel opened, gone a moment later with the same brutal efficiency all Stark tech operated with, the clear and present sound of Tony breathing softly somewhere deep inside the workshop, the whisper of crackling current as machinery operated and Dummy beeped the subdued tone of a child watching a parent cry, confused, so close to frightened it hurt to hear.

 

“Tony?” Steve whispered, not trusting his voice to carry.

 

“Not right now, Steve.” Tony’s voice was thick, like he’d been dragged from the center of a dream, laid out wet and soaking with his throat weighted down with memory and fear. He sounded small.

 

“Please, I--”

 

“Just not right now.” He sounded stronger where Steve was weaker, desperate and pleading on the edges of all his instinctual fears. The need to reach out, to stop a man from falling into the same white embrace of nothingness Bucky had been consumed by, where Steve only had to reach, just a bit further. He would do it for Tony. He had to.

 

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have made you say anything, I didn’t mean to push—I never—I’m sorry, Tony, I’m sorry, but you can’t give up on them. You can’t shut them out. You can’t shut me out.

 

“Don’t shut me out.”

 

A sound like coming up for air, a bitten off sob. Unwilling to be seen weak, even when Steve had been so far behind the mask.

 

“Just go.”

 

Firm. His voice was like Iron.

 

Conviction buried deep inside the pain, rooted there in a latticework of circuitry and veins and metal, hardwired into his system with a thread of lightning and a strength that surprised Steve, even when he knew it shouldn’t. Even when it proved itself there, time and time again.

 

Steve turned, back against the fogged glass and slid down, his forehead resting on his knees. Silence, and the hum of machinery on the other side, the faint sound Tony whispering, to himself or JARVIS, voice like a strained prayer, desperate like the last thread that held everything together was fraying.

 

Steve’s eyes closed against the industrial lightning overhead, and waited. The air wrapped around him, suffocated and buried deep inside his heart, where ice crystals remained in ghosts and the curl of cold inside his lungs.

 

He shivered.

 

He wanted to erase the past day, rub the pads of his fingers into the interview and Tony’s need to protect him and smear the image until he made a new picture, shadows blending into shadows and outlining the soft laugh lines on the corner of Tony’s mouth, forming a smile with the finger paints of time and patience.

 

He wanted to go back to Central Park and tell a futurist to pause his racing mind, and breathe inside the moment, for just a time. Where maybe Tony could see that Steve didn’t need protecting, didn’t need the walls around a fragile forties mind. Didn’t need to be adored in meteor showers of camera flashes and headlines that loved him when he smiled after a mission done.

 

He just needed Tony.

 

That would be enough. So much _more_ than enough.

 

Xx

 

Hours slipped through his fingers, minutes gliding down his skin like raindrops, rolling and collecting in a puddle at his feet, where he could nearly make out his reflection, distorted and angry at himself.

_Stark men are made of Iron._

 

And he ran, he always ran, problems fading into dark corners of his mind where he could pretend they didn’t exist.

 

But his father’s voice was a dirge inside his head and it struck at the center of him, where the arc reactor sat heavy on his heart and the memories of rope and duct tape and ransoms caught on his veins and pumped their own tune of circulation.

 

And he thought about wanting Captain America, when he was too young to understand that he couldn’t come, when he was too desperate to care, when he prayed for red white and blue to come crashing through cave walls and spray vomit-tasting water in the faces of his captors and wrap him and Yinsen up in some strange, solid, impenetrable embrace.

 

And they could go home.

 

He just wanted to go home.

 

Time slipped, circled him in the same fashion the holograms did when he worked, swirled and cascaded down from the walls of his mind, stumbled on the blurred memories of midnights waking from nightmares with Steve’s arms locked around his waist, like the Captain was trying to make up for all his missed rescues.

 

Years caught on seconds on minutes on days, and he remembered the way sunlight gathered Steve’s hair in spun gold and happiness in Central Park, the way he moved in the gym like he trusted that Tony could handle himself, how he sketched in a corner of the workshop, allowing Tony to move to the slow scratch of his pen nearly drowned by the music he would play on low, just for Steve.

 

He remembered the way the Hulk tugged him from the bottom of the Hudson, but it was Cap’s face he really saw, when he reached out like Tony would fall away if he didn’t, be lost like the generation he’d left behind.

 

And time _bleeds_ when it was around Tony.

 

It was a mass of dead bodies and ashes and weapons and Steve, at the center of it all trying to stay out of the snowfall of sins, making him want to be a better man.

 

And it wasn’t until the early hours, after confessions to Steve and the wall and Yinsen to Gods he didn’t believe in, that the seconds slowed long enough for Tony to realize that Steve was _right there_ that all of this was real and his warmth was taking space in Tony’s sheets.

 

And it was hard to stay afloat, when memories swam through his lungs and the water was closing around him and he didn’t want to drag anyone else down, didn’t want to pull them below the brim to drown. Even if Steve was willing, even if he could hold his breath for hours and had grown used to the feeling of being suspended inside of nothing, ice crystallizing in his lungs and frozen. Tony didn’t want that.

 

Not for him.

 

God, he didn’t want that.

 

“Is he still out there? Don’t answer that. I know he’s still out there.”

 

The silence was too much, but he couldn’t make himself move, couldn’t force himself to play in light and motor oil and machine parts that seemed to breathe around his hands, more human than he was. Dummy’s head lay consoling on his shoulder, a fragile whir of beeps to communicate what only Dummy could. _Stuck with you this long. Not going anywhere._ And God did Tony love that, loved the way he was always there, humming along to whatever strange tune of sparked wire and electricity played along his circuitry. Loved the fact that he dated to the 1980’s, and came alive with the blunt hands of a drunk teenager that spent too many nights so completely, devastatingly alone.

 

That he was there for all the nights since.

 

“He’s fallen asleep, Sir,” JARVIS informed him softly, a kind of subdued understanding hidden inside his voice. JARVIS had seen him worse, though. Saw the way he seemed to bleed on the inside when Pepper left him, the way he collapsed in the center of the workshop with such desperate and aching _relief_ , to know she got out alive, she got out.

 

And it hurt, it always hurt to lose the people you loved with all the manic energy in you, but he knew it had to be done. JARVIS knew.

 

“How long?”

 

“Six hours.”

 

Time drifted by, kissed his cheeks in greeting and goodbye and he knew his head could calculate the exact shift and turn, the slip and pull of moments against his whisper of a heartbeat. But he didn’t want to. He wanted to get lost inside the feeling of hollowness inside his chest, like the arc reactor had been pulled from him.

 

He looked down.

 

The blue light shown softly beneath his shirt, a nightlight to his darkness, trying to illuminate the shattered pieces of a shadowed soul.

 

It wasn’t enough.

 

He stood, felt his muscles strain and wished he could find sleep, warm and wanting inside of sheets that tented over his head like he was a child making shadow puppets with the shapes his fingers could make. He wanted peace, innocence in a lifetime of sin, he wanted Steve.

 

Tony walked to the fogged over glass, a wall of white that might have been snow to Steve’s wisdom-filled eyes, and pressed the tips of his fingers against the pane. Clarity spread from his hand on electronic veins and made the black-out disappear in drifts, like cigarette smoke or subway steam, curling into nothing into clear into a picture of the elevator doors and the man braced against the plane.

 

Steve was curled in on himself against the door, his cheek pressed against his knees with that boyish countenance blanketing his features. But Tony swore he could see that frozen perception etched just beneath the surface, like some part of his mind had lived that seventy years, had learned and read and become something greater than the man who went in.

 

He looked small.

 

Despite the broadness of his shoulders and the definition of his muscles, he looked like a child, in the mussed nature of his hair and the slow pattern of his breathing, the soft way his eyes danced behind their lids in the grip of a dream that left the ghost of a slack smile on his face.

 

Tony’s forehead hit the glass, a sigh escaping his parted lips, and he wanted to curl up against Steve’s warmth, to push away the gnawing truth for just a moment and live inside a fantasy that could lull him to sleep.

 

He didn’t want to give this up.

 

He sighed, and Steve jerked awake, caught on the edge of manic, ice in his eyes and his mind, and Tony wondered if it wasn’t just him that slept easier inside of an embrace.

 

“Tony?” Steve asked, voice groggy but ringing with alertness.

 

“Shh, you need to get to bed,” Tony soothed, opening the door with a deft twitch of his fingers and crouching down next to Steve as if he was a small child who’d had a nightmare. As if he was the one who ran away, and needed to be approached like he was breakable.

 

Steve’s eyes searched his, trying to find the fault line beneath the calm, the suppressed pain Tony kept close to his heart, just behind the arc reactor. And for a moment, it was all about the heartbeats, the sound of his blood in his ears and the slow up and down of Steve’s chest. For a moment Tony forgot about the sting, the promise of an ashen smear across Steve’s white starred chest.

 

For a moment, it was about the two of them and the spaces in between, about the dust motes that caught the ceiling light, the dull halo that formed on the crown of Steve’s blonde head, the way his hands clenched and relaxed rhythmically.

 

“You too.”

 

It felt like Tony was choking on the sun, all that light and warmth and aching concern coloring a gaze that should be far and away and wrapped up inside all the things he lost and all the people he’d left behind. Like Tony was, on days when the memories were too much to bear.

 

But this moment wasn’t about the past. It was about sleep, cocooned inside the promise of a better tomorrow and the steady pound of Steve’s heart against his ear. It was about Steve reaching out, catching his forearm in a hold that was both unyielding and so heartbreakingly gentle that Tony’s breath caught in his throat. Like he was swallowing water, but no—like he was swallowing the meeting place of heaven and earth and white stars and cracked Brooklyn streets.

 

Steve’s fingers danced on the inside of his wrist, wanting to pull, to comfort, but hovering, afraid another step would send him slipping through to nothing. Where Tony would turn him away again.

 

And this moment was about Steve, back hunched and lower back probably aching with the last whispers of discomfort, (sleeping against the wall would do that to anyone, even a super soldier) and the blue of his eyes filled with something so desperate it made Tony slow down, the break-neck hum of his brain finally calming in a sea of whispered equations and algorithms.

_I can handle it. Can handle you._

 

The words that went unspoken always seemed to mean the most, when it came to him and Steve. He tugged against the Captain’s grip, trying to break it, face shuttering away with the last whispers of a moment built on the sound of heartbeats and the illusions of security.

 

Steve’s grip tightened.

_I fought in World War II, I punched Hitler in the_ face. _You don’t think I can handle the_ media?

 

No he didn’t.

 

Not when the turned vicious and bit into the fabric of your soul, split you at the seams with talons infected with your sins thrown back at you, over and over and over again. Until you were too beat to get back up again. Until there’s nothing left to do but start to live up to the expectations they have of you. And that had been so easy, so agonizingly easy. And Tony had hated every second of it. Hated himself more, looking back.

 

He was always looking back.

 

He just wanted Steve to avoid that, the bile in the back of his throat and the taste of expensive liquor and women on your tongue, overpriced perfume lingering on your skin and that false laugh that could never fill up the empty spaces, the touch of another body to know you’re really alive at all. Doing 120 on a highway in Malibu until the car spun out, just so you could feel the wind on your face, to know that you really had a face. Smiling cockily for the cameras while your hands built the destruction of women and children half a world away.

 

He had to save Steve from that, even if it meant sacrificing moments spent this, where he breathed for someone else, even if it meant living on dreaming little dreams of him, when he caught the hours in the interim between ideas. Even if it meant his bed was cold and his lungs sloshed when he tried to draw in a breath.

 

He had to keep Steve safe.

 

“You too,” Steve said again, firmer, his hand tightening just the slightest around Tony’s wrist and his sleepy eyes seemed to communicate volumes. Words Tony could never fully make out, even if he spent years studying them beneath the microscopes in Bruce’s labs, even if he peeled those swirls of emotions bit by mechanical bit, refashioned them from the pieces into a new clockwork heart.

 

He thought he caught the odd end of a though, passing through Steve’s tired expression, in the corner of his mouth, fighting between a smile and frown, the annoyance and hope warring in the slight twitch of his nose. _\---not like it’s asking much. Jesus, Tony, just sleep._

 

He was imaging things, making them up as he went along because saying things like that out loud were damning in a way their casual touches never could be. It made everything real, ripped away the fog of fantasy, fresh from the biting end of a nightmare and feverish, needy.

 

But Steve was still standing there. As if it didn’t make sense for him to be anywhere else, like the whole world, for just a moment, centered on Tony and the anxious way he shifted his weight between his feet, and flicked his brown eyes across Steve’s face endlessly, never settling, always looking. Always trying to find the acceptance, the moment when Steve realized that this had to happen. That it wouldn’t hurt as much, this way.

 

That this way, there’s wouldn’t come a day, Steve wouldn’t wake up hating Tony, wouldn’t be consumed by inexplicable frustration at every hello and goodbye, wouldn’t open his eyes and resent the man who lay half on top of him in the mornings. And Tony wouldn’t end up fooling himself in the spaces between then and now, allowing himself to believe in the fairytale of reciprocal breathing and shared heartbeats and heat that bled into the sheets and their skin. He would forget, one day, that the touches Steve granted him, a brush of fingertips across his cheekbone, the glance of Steve’s shoulder against his, they were friendly.

 

He would forget.

 

And then he would break, one of those quick, sharp cracks that would leave him irreparable. The last chip a floodgate could handle, a dam breaking.

 

Tony would be nothing but water at the end of it, just existence.

 

But Steve’s grip on his wrist was unyielding and the sun was concentrated in his eyes, so Tony nodded slowly, like he wasn’t sure where he was, or where he was going, like he was trying to placate a child and allow himself to be one for a moment. Like he was going to breathe Steve in, for one more night, even when he knew he shouldn’t.

 

“Yeah, okay. Me too.”

 

Xx

 

Waking up was like coming back from war, confetti rain and safety lining every inch of his skin, sunlight dancing in dappled patterns on his cheekbones and that overwhelming music echoing in the back of his head, what he felt Times Square must have sounded like when the boys came home, a Big Band playing in the background and couples so caught up they didn’t even need to the tune to dance.

 

Waking up felt like home.

 

Like he was being welcomed back by all his ghosts and a sunrise bright enough to slip inside of, to let the promise of a new, New York City wash softly across him.

 

Tony felt soft in his arms, malleable and boneless in the depths of sleep that had been evading him for more than three days now, Steve knew in some corner of his mind. Steve’d spent them awake in the living room, unconsciousness slipping through his fingers without the warm weight of Tony dipping down his side of the bed, bringing him ever closer and bridging the spaces in between them.

 

He hadn’t really been back to his room for two days, had been busy windswept on the railing overlooking the Hudson and splitting bag after bag in the SHEILD gym, muscles knotting and tension flashing him back to war zones and the sound of iron hitting the river.

 

He sat up slowly, unwillingly, slipping from the cradle of warmth around him and prying his eyes open to another morning, with soft gold sunlight streaming through the windows and reflections from sky scrapers catching his eyes.

 

The sharp lines of his room never failed to catch him off guard, it dashed that unyielding hold of dreams on his mind, where for a moment (and _just_ a moment) he was sure it had all been a dream. He’d woken up from the mission with Peggy in the waiting room, ready for their dance. Eight o’clock, on the dot.

 

SHEILD seemed to make it impossible to shake that feeling, with their reconstruction of the past built around his eyes, enveloping him with half-truths and the whispers of a time he abandoned, people he’d left behind. At his lonely apartment, filled to the brim with echoes of the 1940s, he could almost see Bucky in the corner, laughing at him in that boyish way he used to, spilling his cheap beer on the floor and telling Steve he was a stupid twig for getting into fights in the back alleys, could almost imagine Peggy decking that slimy recruit that almost got chosen. Could almost see Eriskine, reminding him to be a good man.

 

And then Tony had come, swept into the room like he’d belonged there, took one look around and said _My god this is depressing. Are they trying to keep you on ice, still? Just in your head? No. Not having it. I am not allowing a national icon to rot in this ridiculously cheap place. There’s not even a window. What is this even. New York is like half windows. No. Get your bag. You’re moving in_. and left again.

 

Steve followed.

 

Steve thought he would always follow.

 

He froze, caught on the edge of a pleasant memory fading into a New York skyline and trapped into a sudden stillness by the sight of his far wall. Tension lined his body, a sudden inability to swallow coupled with his pulse throbbing erratically in the hollow of his throat made it suddenly hard to breathe. It was like the world narrowed, concentrated on a previously blank expanse of cream wall, like an unpainted canvas.

 

“Tony.”

 

The small man didn’t stir, curled cat-like and warm against a pillow, half-hidden beneath the sheets with his hair sticking up in every direction, bed head catching rays of sunlight and turning a soft, warm brown. The circles beneath his eyes spoke like bruises did, hard bloom of a dying flower against tan skin that never failed to make him wince and Steve wanted him to keep sleeping, to tell him later to take back what he said behind the HD screen and bridge the spaces in between them. Prove he wasn’t afraid of the consequences.

 

But he couldn’t help it.

 

“Tony,” he said again, his voice pitching high and catching the barest edge of desperation.

 

“Make Pepper do it,” Tony mumbled, so low Steve almost couldn’t hear him, his voice rough and disused, blanketed with sleep and too much coffee, liquor, silence.

 

Sometimes Steve wondered if Tony talked so much because he needed to hear a human voice.

 

“ _Tony_.”

 

The strain in Steve’s voice roused the genius, had him sitting up and blinking away three hours of rest, clinging to the last kisses of it against his eyes as he wiped sleep from his deep brown eyes. Intelligence roused slowly, demanded caffeine and lingered over the defined ridges of Steve’s muscles, the whiteness of his knuckles and the tilt of his jaw.

 

Tony wished he could draw something other than machines.

 

Wished he could breathe life into a portrait.

 

“Oh.”

 

The moment slotted into place, and Steve’s shuddered eyes seemed to accuse, in that quiet, disapproving way he got when Tony drank too much in the communal rooms and passed the time yelling at the ceiling, JARVIS long ignoring him. Like he was sad, like he wanted to pick you up from the gutter and steer you towards a better future.

 

He was rigid, staring at the far wall as if it would give him all the answers, and the image filtered in slowly through Tony’s fogged brain, catching the odd end of blurred edges, of a shield that refused to touch the ground, of weak shoulders smearing elegantly into strong, of the ghost of thin filling out into the solidity of human perfection.

 

Of past slipping gracefully into present, filling out all the spaces in between and capturing the lonely street in Brooklyn as it was meant to be, through the snap-shot of a past that never really left behind on rough brick exteriors and black-tar gum sidewalks.

 

Steve’s two drawings, transposed effortlessly within each other.

 

“ _Oh_? Tony, wha—this is. _Tony_.”

 

Steve’s tongue felt heavy, sticking to the roof of his mouth with every half-realized fear he’d ever had about the future and every regret that lined bowed, thin shoulders in the past. Things that weighed on asthmatic lungs with the heavy pressure of the Depression, the frivolous way people treated things now, the way the cars were ugly and didn’t catch the sun like they used to, but the buildings reached as if trying to touch heaven, trying to bridge the gap between the two worlds. Where the same malice shot through cold eyes when you brushed someone on the street, but no one trusted the traveling salesman that came to your door.

 

Where hardly anyone believed in anything anymore, but they still killed in the name of one God or another to justify it.

 

Some days he wondered what he was fighting for.

 

“It was Jarvis’ idea.”

 

Tony’s muttered voice broke through the fog with that kind of pent up certainty he only carried when he was lying.

 

“Really?” Steve asked, a smile breaking across his face with all the blinding power he carried with him in the past, where their cramped and dirty campsites in the middle of Germany kept the men huddled around the fire, trading stories, and the burlesques in France made his face heat a dark, cherry red, and Bucky slapped his back without fear of shattering his small body. He smiled like he was born to do it, like the sun had risen inside his chest and things looked just a bit brighter from the inside.

 

Tony peeked critically from his cave of bed sheets, narrowed eyes tracing the Captain’s relaxed form, and the way his eyes caught the near dawn of too-early morning. The moment dragged on, before the genius nodded resolutely, holding eye contact that felt like a physical touch.

 

“Yes. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

 

And Steve laughed, a dam broken in his chest and everything spilling around him with the sharp inflection of his senses, gathering everything about this moment and storing it away, keeping it safe in the palms of his hands.

 

It felt like having the life breathed back into him.

 

“You laughing at me?” Tony asked, sarcasm blanketing his words with the thick laziness of sleep and content, tinged with laughter that seemed both infectious and terrifyingly easy.

 

And it struck Steve that there was no longer anything strange about this, about seeking solace in each other, about poking at the wounds until they healed (because that’s how these kind of scars _worked_ ) and reveling in the silence that seemed a substitute for prayer.

 

This was where they belonged, hovering on the cusp of something so sensitive no one else could see it, and allowing it to pass freely, slip across their skin like a cool sheet, and laughing like nothing could keep them from it if they tried.

 

This was the moment he never got to have, where you finally realized you were home, and the bombs were behind you. And you could breathe, where the laughter was mostly hysteria and relief battling it out in your chest in a flurry of heartbeats that reminded him of crisscrossing clotheslines swaying in the wind between buildings in Brooklyn, and the sound of children running in the street, the lurching feeling when a ship launched and docked all rolled up in one second.

 

A moment so brilliantly normal it hurt, cut a deep swath through the fear and the pain and all the secrets he guarded too close to his chest.

 

He felt alive, and this was him defrosting, Tony had been waking him up.

 

That broken, manic genius, with the phantom rope burns around his wrists and the tacky taste of duct tape on his dry lips, with the pantomime heart that flowed with the same blue-freeze of the arctic but felt warm beneath his fingertips, with the coiled muscles and the scars, that man _fixed_ him. In ways Steve didn’t even know he needed to be fixed.

 

Tony’s critical eye had blended his worlds together seamlessly, transposed it onto his wall like he could step into it and be warmed by the echoes of a past close, but not close enough to be anything more than a strange half-remembered dream, something he was sure he imagined on days when the people seemed too different and no one seemed to think about the cost, the pain. It shown like something magical, the fuzziness of heroic myth on the boundaries and sharp on the edges of his shield and the pristine quality of light as it rebounded off of car windows and sky scrapers, old Brooklyn shop windows.

 

And the words, a curving script that held an elegance Steve’s uniform print never managed to inspire, alive with the manic intensity that made him taste the blue-glow of holographic dance and smell the rich hum of machinery given life, beginning in the top left and finishing soundly in the bottom right, forcing him to look across the entirety of the mural, Steve’s life story laid bare.

_Maybe you don’t belong in the future…_

_Maybe the future belongs to you._

 

And the Assembly Alarm blared to life around them.

 

Xx

_“Why are they always on vacation, really?! We never get vacation! I want a vacation. Steve, you are coming with me to Malibu and we are having a vacation. The Fantastic Fucking Four can deal with our messes while we’re gone. Fair’s fair, man. This is getting ridiculous. Fourth time this month. We don’t even_ know _Doom! He’s not even our nemesis. He doesn’t even_ go here _!”_

 

Tony’s voice down the line was static-flavored hymn, petulant and childish and colored with all the startling clarity revelation could give you. It was alive and constant and the sound of it, as Tony danced with the wind outside of their transport, made something in Steve slow and savor and feel nearly at peace, the hum of near battle subdued in his veins.

 

Steve checked the controls compulsively, watching Natasha fly like it was second nature, with her nimble fingers wrapped around the control column. The plane felt too loud, the sound of it crashing in his ears and thrumming through his body with a constant vibration that kept him on edge and made the space inside the cockpit feel small and confined.

 

Steve thought about actually flying, wondered what it would be like to grip Iron Man’s shoulder and hold on for dear life with the air jerking at his body and slamming against his skin with the intimacy of a nothingness lover, one who walked in cold and wind kissed him sweet with so much something, he could understand why Tony loved it. He could understand why Tony’s eyes were always wide, blown black and wild with his hair sticking in every direction and his breath leaving him in cool rushes of ecstasy.

 

“Stark, while your knowledge of _Mean Girls_ is endlessly amusing, can we please focus for more than two seconds? We’re dealing with a formidable criminal attempting to enslave over half of New York City.” Coulson said, his face an impassive mask of calculated pushing, finding his boundaries with the new knowledge of the man built in his hand, find which way to step.

 

“Yes, the Doctor of Doom holds to be a most worthy opponent! His mastery over my great lighting is most laborious to overcome!” Thor chimed in, a wolfish smile spreading across his face in a fashion Steve found too similar to Loki’s, all arrogance and divinity squashed down into a human form, the power of the worlds between his hands.

 

“The Other Guy is also quite anxious for a rematch,” Bruce said softly, wincing around his words when he remembered the bolt of white-hot electricity the Hulk had taken, and Steve could remember the way it smelled, like charred meat.

 

“Be that as it may, I would appreciate some semblance of order, or I’ll be forced to do even more paper work on you people.”

 

“ _Please, Phil, like it’s hard to figure out_.” Tony’s voice was that warm kind of pompous it got when he was teasing, and Steve thought there was some relief in the way Phil relaxed his shoulders. “ _We’re headed towards the Delaware Aqueduct to fight Doom, so clearly he’s trying to poison the New York water supply, which is silly, really, nearly everyone has Brita_.”

 

“Despite the fact that you seem to believe a Brita water system can filter out over a hundred pounds of XTY, the US government doesn’t agree,” Phil said dryly.

 

“Isn’t that overkill?” Clint asked, head tipped to the side and missing, for a moment, easy missions with easy villains who only wanted to assassinate a world leader or two.

 

“ _Heh,_ ” Tony chuckled under his breath.

 

“Please don’t chuckle at the imminent demise of over half of New York City,” Steve said around a sigh, smile tugging at his lips.

 

“ _It’s not effective if I can hear your smile._ ”

 

“The point _being_ that we have work to do, so at least try not to be stupid,” Coulson said smoothly, utting through what could so easily become tension, awkward and shy and stiff.

 

“ _Your confidence is overwhelming._ ”

 

And that was easy, the quick bite of sarcasm bleeding through the comm units and the frazzled way Tony’s voice sounded wound up inside electricity itself, rubbed raw by the crackle of life and seeping out into the air with the thrum of excitement that infected the others. That was normal, to hear the manic energy kick start in the center of the genius, like the suit and reactor fused together at the soul and made him something new altogether.

 

Steve was still wondering what it felt like to fly.

 

But he couldn’t picture the metal pieces of such perfect artwork encasing anyone but Tony, anyone but the mad genius with not enough sleep and a heart that cared too much, that pushed himself to the limits of his body and sanity and then did more. Always more.

 

“ _The drug itself is something Doom’s been paling around with for about ten years, back before he got all shiny and started taking his last name seriously, he calls it XTY for unknown reasons, and the project gained absolutely no ground until he started experimenting with the radiation he was exposed to on that space station with Mr. Fantastically Dull and the rest of the Men-In-Tights group---”_

 

“And woman! Can’t forget Sue Storm,” Clint added quickly, an appreciative whistle cutting through the air around them.

 

“ _Not interested,_ ” Tony said flatly, and Steve thought he could hear equations in his voice, screaming to be seen and catching his attention, as the red and gold suit twisted elegantly in the air. “ _Anyway, the radiation gave him the ability to manipulate brain waves through a series of complex coding that deals with biology and is therefore annoying._ Theoretically _, he could pinpoint and damage the neocortex, which does some biology stuff that doesn’t make any sense.”_

 

“Don’t hurt yourself, Stark,” Natasha muttered, flicking her eyes to Bruce with the quiet kind of impatience that seemed bred into people that survived solely on efficiency and cunning. Her lithe body reclined at the controls, piloting with the deft attention of someone who’d done it a million times, and would do it a million more.

 

Bruce swallowed, scratching at the side of his face, and Steve wondered if he was replaying yesterday at HQ, when they pushed and Tony snapped. If he was thinking about all the things he could have said, should have done, to save the genius that one moment of desperation, of backed-into-a-corner fear.

 

“That portion of the brain controls general motor function, spatial reasoning, sensory perception, language, and conscious thought. What Doom is trying to do is manipulate the communication between all of those layers and project his own reality and thought onto them, essentially stripping them of all individuality and creating an army of senseless droids operating on a theoretical hive mind,” Bruce explained calmly, because he’d worked in third world countries and handled lonely children with meningitis in a dilapidated shack, the roof threatening to cave in, and held the hand of grieving mothers and daughters and sons, and stitched the pieces of people back together.

 

Steve could see the worry there, beneath the surface of the meditative silence that almost always seemed to wrap around him, as if it were a part of his skin and he carried it with him nearly everywhere he went. Except when Tony threw it away, when his presence burned away the last traces of isolation and they laughed like they had no fears, like Bruce had no monster in his head, nor Tony in his heart. When there were lights and explosions and the flippant way Tony called them ‘Science Bro’s but _always_ seemed to mean it.

 

Steve wondered if that was just two people reaching out, picking themselves up and dusting each other off. If that was them getting up again, recognizing that another had fallen, trying to help them stand.

 

“ _But it wasn’t working on a large scale. At least, not until Doom managed to get the Silver Surfer as his pet for a few months.”_

 

Tony’s voice was more than distantly sympathetic, and Steve watched from the co-pilot chair as Tony made lazy loops at supersonic speed, and he thought he was seeing caves, hearing the last chords of ‘Back in Black’ cut out with the sudden viciousness of fire and dust. If he felt grimy fingers against his shoulders, shoving him down into the most uncaring form of existence and waiting for him to break.

 

“He got out,” Steve pointed out, his voice hushed without his permission, a kind of reassurance that was meant for beneath sheets and with the moon cradling them against her changing faces. “How was Doom able to regenerate whatever piece of him he took?”

 

“According to Storm’s report he ‘just freaking grows back, like absorbs bullets and reforms around them, and I do not know where they go or what he does with him, but I really hope it’s not too kinky,’” Clint said automatically, rolling his eyes as he ran his fingers over his quiver, catching on the new acidic arrows Tony had made him last week.

 

“The Fiery One should learn to respect those of the Other Worlds, not many take kindly to such treatment,” Thor said darkly.

 

“ _Johnny is undoubtedly a dumbass, but the point here, is that too much of biology is based on guesses for me to accurately compile an antidote, though I’ve been following Doom’s research into this study for a few months, same for Bruce, though he’ll hide behind the ‘magic’ aspect.”_

 

“So, what you’re saying is, our plan is attack?” Steve asked, lips quirking at the corners and he imagined the look on Tony’s face, the bright spark that fired between them over Germany, with Steve’s past rolling in wilderness and campfires and he didn’t want to touch down, didn’t want to stumble across the same places the Commandos had walked. And then Tony, crass and charming with the metal of his suit shining with all the daring that burned in his eyes and he’d _flown_ and Steve had followed.

 

Even then, he had to.

 

“ _The tunnel itself is over 85 miles long, but I’ve corned it down to a stretch of five where routine maintenance has closed several valves to stop the water. So far as I can tell, Doom’s planning to introduce the toxin there, and the tunnel itself is definitely Hulk sized._ ” Tony answered, dipping down to skim against a low cloud and batter it out of existence. “ _ETA two minutes.”_

 

Steve nodded; his face hardened with the intent of war, ready dive into fire.

 

“Bruce, you’re only going down there if you think the Hulk understands the concept of a target, because if he takes to those walls, we’re done and half of New York City falls under the control of a madman,” Steve ordered, his voice every bit the Captain he was, commanding and strong from the inside out, unbreakable. Bruce nodded solemly, his hands wringing anxiously in his lap. “Hawkeye and Widow are on the drug, find it and get it out of there as soon as possible, don’t bother to wait for us, the priority is the safe extraction. No direct hits against any of the siding, no lightning, Thor, no bullets that can or might ricochet off Doom’s body. Hulk, Iron Man, Hawkeye, take the South end and work your way to the center, We’ll take the North.”

 

And that was something he understood, the mechanics of their movements, the synergy between costumes and weapons and the thread of extraordinary that wound its way across their bodies, souls, minds. He could read the fabric of a battle plan with just the tips of his fingers, could send the pieces scattered across a board and lead them safely home.

 

This wasn’t the cover of night and the gentle feel of his hands sweeping down Tony’s forearms, to try and hold him together, to hold himself together. This wasn’t echoes of his past and hopes for the future, wasn’t the center of all his lost faith in the warm brown eyes of a man who cared too much. This wasn’t the weight of water on his shoulders, the sound of Tony’s voice as it stumbled over near-sobs, the fragile, nearly non-existent quiver of his lower lip that let Steve know he was close to breaking, close to falling into he could never let himself be, bruised and wounded and vulnerable.

 

This wasn’t the realization of love or the warm way Tony’s name tasted on his tongue.

 

This was battle, was shield and cowl and redwhiteblue and everything he needed to feel useful.

 

This was the serum pumping brilliance through his veins and a dance of fire and steel and blood. This was the Commandos in his mind and the Avengers at his back, was leaving anger and hatred behind and trying for _saving_ for stopping the pain before it could start. This was steps in both directions with the past biting at his heels and the future dragging him forward. This was safe as it was exhilarating, the harsh pump of blood in his ears the only way he knew he was still alive, some days. This was what he needed, a craving in the center of him that needed to be sated with the sharp edge of his shield and the solid movements of his body.

 

Tony twisted into his line of sight, a blur of red and gold, a modern Hermes with a heart of a blue-white star, and saluted him with two fingers. Steve could imagine him smiling, slipping back into things that were easy, things that sat right on their shoulders. Not as frightening as a confession in a darkened bed room, as facing a team who’d seen him weak without the protection of threat, as slipping beneath Steve’s sheets and _knowing_ his time was slipping through his fingers, was dragging across his skin and thinking _tomorrow I have to leave, for you, for good_. Steve could see it in his eyes, the conviction in his own weakness, his own twisted inadequacy in Captain America’s shadow and Steve wanted to _fix it_. Wanted to shake him by the shoulders and tell him _I’m right here, don’t make decisions for me!_

 

But not now.

 

Instead he reveled in the weight of his shield braced against his leg and the feel of his suit, the heartpounding raw edge of the waiting, the expectancy of a fight that could shake him to the foundation of himself, where maybe he could finally locate all the pieces and put himself back together the right way. This time.

 

Maybe he could do the same to Tony. Maybe they could build themselves together in the wrecked aftermath of war with empty Chinese takeout strewn around the living room and a B movie humming the background.

 

He smiled, because Tony would talk over the dialogue, make fun of the effects, would plop his feet in Steve’s lap and fall asleep with his tablet tucked to his chest, and they would be friends. Maybe nothing more but it would be enough to mend all these fractured pieces. To help the genius in the same way he’d helped Steve with a mural on his wall and the brand of understanding in his words. _Maybe the future belongs to you._

 

To them both.

 

Their drop crested into Steve’s quick vision, and he hardened into the Captain’s mold, leaving behind insecurities and fears and an affliction of the heart that twisted him into knots and made him think too much, feel too much.

 

He was a soldier, he was Captain America.

 

“We clear?” he asked, and a kid from Brooklyn was still calling the shots, refused riding passenger seat to military genius and filled him with conviction and truth more powerful than anything Doom could ever throw at him.

 

He half turned from the windshield to see nods of assent, Phil making quick notes with the stern face he wore when combat fell on them from all sides, and they were in the thick of it with time counting against them, with lives on the line.

 

Iron Man nodded curtly, rolling midair with nothing short of excitement, dancing with the wind and the metal casing on his body glinting in the sunlight. When he spoke his voice was warm, the pent up affection and eagerness warring through the tone down the comm and it made something in Steve _want_ far too much.

 

“ _Aye aye, Captain.”_


	4. A Lie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so sorry this took so long. I had writers block and then I LOST MY USB and then I had to write a short story and then I FOUND my USB (whose name is Pepper, because she's efficient and well organized), so well, I wrote a shit ton of pages in word in one afternoon.   
> There are some flashbacks in this, the transitions are in italic Xx so it won't be too hard to figure out. There is also a big moment. A MOMENT, moment. Let me know what you think.   
> PLEASE COMMENT. Commenting will get you everywhere.  
> Every.where.

It was dark.

 

The emptiness of a false-night consumed their single shaft of light on all sides, and Steve saw the sky over Germany and the color of black eyes and a black heart hidden inside a red skin. He saw all the things he shouldn’t. Because darkness did that to you.

 

It woke up the nightmares from their ancient sleep.

 

But he went in anyway, dropped to the bottom the aqueduct and thought it a tunnel, huge and endless. The wall behind them groaned with the weight of water, and Steve thought about the sound the plane made, as it begged to land, ice fields glaring up from below.

 

“ _Got eyes on Dr. Dummy yet?_ ”

 

“’Dr. Dummy’?” Steve asked incredulously, imaging red and gold streaks across the sky, circling his own drop site like a cat read to curl on a warm spot of sunlight.

 

“ _Not my best work, I’ll admit._ ” He could hear the laughter in Tony’s voice, alive and free.

 

“You’ll have to practice more.”

 

“ _What about Dr. Tin Britches?_ ”

 

“Worse.”

 

“ _I’ll work on it. You got him in sight?_ ”

 

“Negative. We’re going in slow. See you on the other side?”

 

“ _Can we please stop the flirting on the communal line?_ ” Clint asked, his voice sounding distant with the impending weight of battle. Silence consumed them again, as Natasha dropped down beside him, Thor after her, and they took their first steps into the darkness.

 

He could have been taking a step back in time, for all he knew, a step into the in-between realm of asleep and awake. And he would wake an hour from now, the years lacking eighty he didn’t live and the new millennium only a promise on the wind. And this would have all been a dream.

 

Sometimes, Steve was still lost inside the forties. He was still trapped behind a wall of snow and ice, and the cold rush of death gripped the center of him. He felt like a ghost.

 

He could remember the shadow over Bucky’s eyes, when he slipped and was embraced by white, lost among the nothingness. He could feel the acrid smell of rationed cigarettes and campfires mingling in the back of his throat. He tasted ash and saw white.

 

When the nights were slow, he could savor the Depression on his tongue, if he wanted, see the orphanage behind his eyes. And it was like he’d never left.

 

He caught glimpses of his past when turning corners and saw demons in the color red and a German accent. He dissolved into flashbacks at the sound of a car backfiring, and got lost in the consuming fire of that burning warehouse of Nazi weapons when he looked too long at the sun.

 

Sometimes, Steve was nothing but a repeat of a reel he’d already seen.

 

If he held the film in place too long, he’d burn away.

 

He couldn’t sit still.

 

Stillness ate at him with the threat of war and raids and the Commandos growing bored. He could still hear the tenor of their insults, in different accents and languages and the way they looked, dirt-streaked and bleeding, laughing around a bullet.

 

Sometimes he wondered if the other Avengers could hear him through the walls. If they listened on the nights he woke gasping around a scream, when he threw a lamp into the wall where he thought Red Skull stood with that manic grin. He wondered if they thought less of him.

 

But he knew Tony didn’t.

 

Tony, who tossed technology at him until the past seemed to sink away, who seemed to know how little words amounted to, who knocked shoulders with him and screamed and shouted and let Steve pour all that anger down into his chest and who took it, and gave it back.

 

Who gave him a future to run along his past, who plastered them both on his bedroom wall.

 

Steve needed him.

 

He could wake up, from the inside of that darkness, and find it all to be a dream. But he didn’t want it to be.

 

Had he ever said thank you?

_Xx_

 

“Steeeeve you are being absolutely ridiculous.”

 

“Ridiculous and sane are two completely different things.”

 

Tony sighed, draped inelegantly over the couch with his tablet balanced on his knees. He looked bedraggled, dragged from the center of sleep with his hair in every direction and grease stains etched into the very pigment of his skin.

 

“What’s the point of being a billionaire, genius, playboy, philanthropist if I can’t take Captain America to Malibu in my private jet?” he whined, huge brown eyes turned in full force onto Steve.

 

“I have a press conference this week.”

 

“And I have three board meetings and a new patent ceremony thing. I’m still going.” Tony said it like it happened every day, like he was talking about going out for milk later.

 

The sun outside rained in on them with a pleasant sort of heat. The days had faded into each other, from Tony’s swim in the Hudson to their walk in Central Park hours earlier. It was all a spectacular blur of time and heartbeats.

 

“Patent?”

 

Tony’s eyes caught the light, and looked suddenly brighter, a spark hidden inside, as he turned a blinding grin onto Steve.

 

“For the toaster.”

 

“Charmander? We’ve been product testing for you?” Steve asked, suddenly and irrationally worried their little AI would suddenly disappear. Even if he didn’t understand the name at all, or why Clint always shouted ‘I choose you!’ when he addressed it. Steve was just starting to understand the array of buttons.

 

“It was in the rental agreement you signed,” Tony answered, eyes glued to the screen of his glass tablet as equations danced and mingled before his eyes. “He has a permanent room here because of your willing participation.”

 

What he wanted to say was _Thank you for just knowing_ , instead he smiled and said, “I didn’t sign anything.”

 

“Oh. This could be a serious contractual oversight. Don’t sue me, please.”

 

“What if I do?” Steve challenged.

 

“I’ll be forced to send you back to the Windowless Room of Depression. I’ll set you up a bunk with Fury and you can have pillowfights and trade super secrets. I’m sure you’ll enjoy yourself immensely. I would ask you to send me a postcard, but Nicky won’t allow you to have friends. It’s not regulation,” Tony said matter of factly.

 

And Steve laughed, because he could, because it felt like waking up, because it felt like taking your first deep breath out of the water. He felt alive. And it was like Tony made things sharper, like he tore into that fog around his eyes and reminded him that he wasn’t just a memory, that he survived, the world was a step forward and the past could still lay easy on his soul.

 

That he could handle this, that he could let go.

 

He caught the odd end of Tony’s smile, soft and warm. It settled on his chest like the soft whisper of a lover in the night, like a kiss pressed just over his heart, like an embrace that slipped through time and seemed to go on for years of endless full moons and star-print skies.

_Xx_

 

He should say thank you.

 

He moved in darkness, his boots catching on clinging water droplets and slipping, like he was skating across the frozen surface of a lake in France, backpacking through the darkness in Germany.

 

He wondered, for a moment, what the others were thinking, as they breeched the edge of total darkness. If Natasha thought about a little girl with red hair, blindfolded in a camp in Russia, blasted with white noise and curses until she didn’t flinch. If she thought about her first mission, nine or ten with a blade held between her teeth. If Thor thought about the eons he’d lived, the dimensions he’d crossed and the years he spent with Trickster by his side, black eyes to match a black heart. A thousand years denial, a thousand years of empty promises and love he couldn’t give up on.

 

“No sign of him,” Natasha muttered, the grip on her gun steady and her movements elegant against the wet ground. She reminded him of a dancer.

 

“Move to Ironman’s end. It’s a five mile stretch we need to make in less than five minutes. Coulson’s dropping transport now. Thor, fly ahead.” Steve spoke into the darkness like it would absorb his words.

 

A flash of lightning lit the aqueduct in a moment of ancient white-fire, and the wind brushed against Steve’s face through the cowl. Thor was gone a moment later in a rush of static and nervous energy.

 

The agents above them worked systematically, a perfect machine Steve could only marvel at, could never really imitate. They hooked thick straps to his chariot with deft fingers, the muscles in their backs straining beneath their blue suits as it lowered gently through the still air.

 

“ _ETA to drop zone in five, four…_ ”

 

“Take it slow, Ironman, Don’t give away your position.”

 

He knew how to do this, how to pin in their opponent with the smallest touches, until they were a trapped butterfly against a wall. Able to change the weather in Kansas, to cause a storm in southern Nevada, to enslave half of New York City, if only they could move. Steve could be sure they would never, ever move.

 

“ _Roger Rogers._ ”

 

The motorcycle touched down with a kiss to the concrete.

 

It shown beneath their piece of sun, and it seemed to dare that darkness with the ferocity of its headlight. Red and White and Blue and perfect.

 

He could feel the promise of battle hot down the back of his neck, a thunder of his heartbeat and the distant, roaring crash of titans meeting, of metal coming to life. Thor had found the array of Doombots the Doctor always seemed to keep at his side, and the sight of lightning traveled five miles so easily.

 

Suddenly everything was a flood, the war was raging and soldiers fighting and Steve was too far away and he needed closercloser to _help_ , he needed to help.

 

Steve slung his body over it forcefully, an urgency setting into his bones, because he knew it could take it, gripped the handles like they were the only thing keeping him alive, and felt Natasha settle her arms around his waist. The engine rumbled in his ears like thunder, thrumming through his veins alive and bright and free. He gunned it.

 

And then there was only darkness and wind.

_Xx_

 

“It was _supposed_ to be a surprise. But _someone_ here is a traitor,” Tony said with a petulant glare at the ceiling. “So you get to see it now.”

 

The workshop was alive with color and music, blaring through unseen speakers and thumping its own heartbeat into the open space. Steve had grown used to it, had almost begun to like it, though his skin still bore chills when Tony decided to pity him and played Sinatra until the early hours of the morning.

 

 “You failed to include specific parameters to your instructions, Sir,” JARVIS commented coolly, his voice a modicum of texture. Like someone had breathed life into it.

 

“How much more specific can I get than ‘Don’t tell Steve’?”

 

“I didn’t ‘tell Steve’. I informed Mister Barton while Captain Rogers was in the room.”

 

“You sneaky bastard.”

 

Tony said it with pride.

 

Steve could almost picture them, a thin, aging British man with a sharp wit and a patient mind, and Tony, a whirlwind of feeling and light and brilliance. He could almost see one of those small, reluctant smiles painted on Jarvis’ face when Tony worked himself into exhaustion and fell asleep at his workbench, shaking his head as if at a toddler as he placed a blanket around his shoulders.

 

“I am only what you allow me to be,” JARVIS said, and the humor was unmistakable, almost like a physical touch.

 

“You’re funny, you know that?”

 

“I intended to be.”

 

Steve leaned against the workbench, a smile sitting naturally across his features, like it belonged there. The center of the electrical chaos had been swept to the side, creating an illuminated stage of concrete and light, holograms that swirled around a thick white tarp. Dummy rested his head across his knees, whirring insistently until he ran his fingers over coarse metal and wires.

 

He felt at home.

 

“Why do I even keep you around? You’re mean. And a traitor.”

 

“Tony, was I supposed to be seeing something?” Steve asked around a chuckle, watching Tony run a grease-stained hair through his hair, his thread-bare shirt riding up to reveal a thin stripe of tan muscle. Steve swallowed.

 

“Oh right!”

 

No one ever told Steve that when Tony focused his attention on you, it would be like staring into the sun. Like falling face-first into a gale-force wind, so strong it manages to keep you almost upright, and for those moments, you’re flying. Like having all the stars concentrated, shifted together until they all eclipsed each other and shined a billion times brighter. Like having some strange filter taken off of your sight and you saw things a hundred times clearer, a hundred times more beautiful. Like any fleeting thought, every wayward emotion you’d ever felt was suddenly crammed back into your skull, and you were drowning inside of all of that feeling, all of that life. It was almost like dying, in a beautiful, frighteningly easy way.

 

Could anyone alive survive it?

 

 “I remembered the bike you disappeared on after we sent Loki to his room for a timeout, and I thought you could use something in the field.  Bit more patriotic,” he said with a shrug, his fingers finding purchase in the sheet, smudging it with oil. It lifted with a flourish, like a ghost taking to the nothingness of the otherworld.

 

Steve wondered how he ever could have missed the heart of this man. He wore egocentricity as a mask, charm on his sleeve, and tossed his affection at you in projects and weapons and protection because it was the only way he knew how.

 

If Steve didn’t know Tony, he would say the bike was a love letter.

 

Past met the present in a whisper of chrome and steel and tires. Red and White and Blue touched it softly, the colors finding natural rest on the sleek, stunning lines. And Steve didn’t think of Germany or France or the feeling of weightlessness that first bike gave him when he sailed in to the very heart of a Nazi camp. He didn’t think of a past he could read in grey-reels that felt only months old, or Peggy’s lips curved upwards in a smile hidden in a compass.

 

Instead, he thought about flying. He thought about gliding on top of this new machine that lived inside the future and carried whispers of the past and watching Ironman do lazy loops in the clouds above his head. He imagined matching speed for speed and mixing red and white and blue with gold and hotrod red.

 

Tony rocked onto the balls of his feet, nervous energy packed into corded muscle and the twitchy way he smiled, waiting. But Steve’s eyes were fixed on the bike.

 

He saw it for what it was.

 

It was a second shield, built to carry him and the weight of his fight, the handles tall and proud and a white star headlight cutting its way through darkness. An artillery hidden behind its elegance, this bike was dangerous. This bike was alive and free and beautiful. This bike was—

 

“Perfect.”

_Xx_

 

The aqueduct looked to be carved by Gods, dug out like tunnels in sand castles by giant children with idle hands, to be separated from vast expanses of nothingness and then suddenly given substance. It looked like it didn’t belong, like it had been there forever out of place and permanent, worn edges clinging with wetness and age.

 

Tony touched down as carefully as the suit would allow, red and gold gleaming in the soft half-light and there was nothingness before him.  Another step and the darkness would swallow him.

 

He moved onward.

 

Because that was what he did. He moved on, another step into the darkness.

 

He could feel the weight of Clint and Bruce behind them, hear the echo of their steps filtered through his systems, and the HUD was alight before his eyes, like technical fireworks, like florescent veins mapping their way across the field of his vision.

 

They moved in silence, seconds that seemed to slide across their skin like slow-falling raindrops, the way snowflakes would turn to water on your skin and fall downward.

 

Sometimes, Tony could feel the breaking point, could taste it on the tip of his tongue, something sweeter than before that reminded him of the strawberries he couldn’t give Pepper and the way Steve didn’t like it when he tried to buy back the Dodgers for him. But Pepper wore artificial strawberry lip balm and Tony knew he caught a smile when he showed Steve the check.

 

It was a moment of heat, a rush of something so much like hot air down the center of the tunnel, and it was like the walls had come alive around them, like molten iron and lead had been poured into their mouths and they just had to swallow.

 

He’d always hated Doombots, the way they scuttle-crawled like mutant crabs, the way his hands could build it, make it better. The hours he spent tearing them apart from the inside out to make a better defense against them, a sick game of better tech, the higher or the smaller the body count, consumer reviews were through the roof.

 

Green exploded in the corner of the HUD, rage and sweet, brilliant heat sweeping Bruce up at the center and expanding, growing with a deadly sort of quiet that took so many by surprise. Tony loved it.

 

He loved the way Bruce could control the anger, the way he didn’t let it beat him. The way he used it.

 

He imagined it was kind of like riding a comet, or trying to steer the sun.

 

But Bruce did it.

 

When the days came slow and empty, and liquor bottles stacked high next to his welder and he was elbows deep in some part of the television, he would think of that. Think of riding comets and wringing his hands around the beast inside him, tightening until it suffocated, until it bent to him. He imagined his father, wasted away in the darkness of his workshop, and was sure Bruce had his own ghosts, the color green and sad, lumbering and clumsy in the depths of his soul.

 

Jade hands gripped a Doombot by what seemed to be the arms and split it, like a discontented child upset with a toy. Tony stood back to back with the Hulk and felt the fire in his palms, shot repulsors with an accuracy that had become second nature. That made him think of missile tests at thirteen and the way the world could burn if he wanted it to.

 

Sometimes his own monsters surprised, his own Other Guy. The one that wanted to watch cinders and ash float up, backwards into the sky, who wanted to right all the wrongs in any way he could.

 

Death was a strange invitation.

 

Sometimes he thought Stane got off too easy, and he felt the deep down ache in his nerves like the Sonic Taser was still humming through his veins. Doom never got off easy, was always yanked from his high little perch at the last moment and shoved back with the scum of the world.

 

CEO and murder appeared to be synonyms.

 

Tony didn’t like to think about how close he was to supervillian, how the world could crumble beneath him, how he could take it and rip, like a child with a toy, like the Hulk, and watch it burn from the inside out. Watch it eat itself.

 

A shot to the shoulder panel sent him reeling backwards, seeing the darkness in layers that let him know his field of vision was changing, he was pushed back onto the wet ground. Metal fingers found purchase, and the suit lurched up, kicked violently with the repulsor ready, and took out two hulking metal crabs at once.

 

The sensors stretched out for Steve, always for Steve.

 

If anyone was the hero of this story, it was Captain America, after all.

 

Hawkeye had devolved into shadows. It seemed only natural; Tony didn’t bother to question it. It was kind of like the archer walked in other-ness, like he had wings no one could see, like he didn’t quite belong on the ground, under the sun.

 

Tony knew what that was like.

 

He wasn’t sure when Thor joined the fray, exactly, only that JARVIS was still sniffing out Doom, the lower wall thickly guarded by the Avengers and a sea of Doombots bashing clumsily into the sides of the aqueduct, spitting lasers in abstract patterns into the cement. He felt like he could hear the water lurching behind the temporary wall, and felt a cool, sticky kind of sweat form at the back of his neck.

 

Lightning played it symphonies to the mechanical whirr of quick moving battle.

 

Tony twisted, arched backwards against the bright red beam of a corrosive laser, and felt more like Ironman than he had in a while. Felt like he could really fly.

 

The heavy thrum of Steve’s motorcycle entered his speakers, and a grin spread wide and cheerful across his face, banter suddenly spewing from his lips with the quick, fine accuracy he loved to hold in his chest. He was alive, cutting through the overwhelming masses of robots and thought---

 

“ _It’s great that we’re fighting a small army and all, though they’re noisy and would make horrible neighbors, but. How did Doom get them down here?_ ”

 

No one answered him, he wasn’t expecting them too. He enjoyed the radio silence, quick and sharp commands from Coulson from up above, and secreted away the sound of Cap’s voice when it filtered down the comm.

 

“Thor branch left and swing in, we’ll pin them in and the Hulk can finish them off. Widow, find Doom.”

 

He bloomed into Tony’s vision from the darkness with Natasha already leaping from the back of the cycle, flying elegantly in the false-wind of motion her curls in playful disarray. Steve’s cowl was drawn over his eyes, but Tony could see the fresh battle-shine he always got. Say what he will, Steve felt the same heart-stuttering joy at the prospect of a battle that he did, got the same glowing pride when they packed the bad guy away into NYPD or SHIELD hands.

 

They did it because it because it was right, and because it felt good, because it took them by the hands and pushed, quickly and without remorse until they were falling and space wasn’t moving and neither were they but they could still the wind and it was okay, they were okay, because it had a sense of rightness nothing else really did. Kids wanted to be superheroes, not because it was the right thing, but because it was _fun_ it was _cool_.

 

“ _I love my job_.”

 

Xx

 

The Doombots fell quickly, huge, furiously empty holes driven in by Ironman’s repulsors and deep ravines from Steve’s shield and pieces blackened by the electric force of a hammer and with firm, unbroken and well placed arrows littering their nerve centers and little bits that crumbled like tinker toys from the hands of a giant. The floor of the aqueduct were littered with robot carcasses and loose metal.

_Tony’s Candyland_ , Steve thought idly. Sometimes he hated how impassive the mask was, the way it stared, flat-eyed and without humor. He wanted to see the smiles he could hear.

 

“Got him. Forty-three degrees south, fifty yards from the dam,” Natasha reported, her voice a terse kind of giddy. “He’s got a water balance system set up to take the drug into the aqueduct, large pipes, some kind of metal, a valve. Not turned yet. Move.”

 

Steve ran, because the souls of his feet were alive with the memory of Germany and bombs and soldiers foaming at the mouth strapped to chairs and little children without homes and without parents. He ran and could hear Thor and the Hulk scrambling with deafening thunder towards them, could somehow feel Hawkeye in the darkness to his right, could taste a bow cutting through the endless black. He ran until darkness blurred into more darkness and the only constant light was Ironman flying beside him.

 

“ _You know, I beat Doom in a science fair once. I think it’s why he turned to villianry. I had a hand in this._ ”

 

It was like a clash of Titans, silver eyes and green skin and rage and the smell of ozone. Doom wore the darkness well, half hidden in shadow and like a mechanical demon in its earthen home. A hell the scent of old water and time.

 

Ironman swerved around bolts of raw electricity like a moth to flame, darting closer and closer with every turn, palms out and luminous, like he held the breadth of heaven in his hands.

 

“Ironman, can you at least pretend to stay on task?” Coulson snapped down the line, his voice a myriad of anxiety and confidence. The sounds of war played a harmony on their comm units.

 

“ _Negative_.”

 

A repulsor blast cut a light through darkness, Steve watched it ricochet off metal skin and bury itself in the stone wall with a deafening crack that sounded like thunder. Doom’s chuckle sounded metallic, like it was threaded through wires and set out of a dusty speaker. Deadly.

 

“At least he’s honest,” Hawkeye noted brightly, just a voice from the shadows.

 

“Let’s be frank, here! You’re no match for me,” Doom announced proudly, batting Steve’s shield aside like it was nothing and sending it flying into Thor, who curved around it awkwardly, a throaty grunt of pain echoing in the darkness. His voice was smooth, the snake-charm intensity of a boardroom, metallic and icy. “You’re just a bunch of blithering idiots _dressed in tights_.”

 

“ _I know you are but what am I?_ ” Tony asked, the speakers making his words come out automatic and lifeless.

 

Thor tossed Steve back the shield, and moved to cover Clint and Natasha as they crept inside darkness towards the flat expanse of temporary dam, where the drug would be ready to be pumped into swirling water, to crawl its way inside of the brains of half of New York City and nest there.

 

“It’s like babysitting supercharged two year olds.”

 

“We’re not that bad, sir,” Steve said brightly, his shield so light on his arm, catching false wind and tearing through the breadth of the aqueduct. It slammed into Doom’s back, interrupting the pattern of lightning from his fingertips and sending it scattering across the ceiling, cracking concrete with a groan of splitting planets and skating across the broad planes of the Hulk’s chest. Green skin sizzled sickly.

 

“HULK SMASH METAL MAN.”

 

Rage carried so far in the dark.

 

Steve felt compressed, like all the sound came from far away, and the world had narrowed, sharpened. He could see Ironman dodging neatly around a thrashing Hulk, torn up on the inside with anger and throwing his huge form at a snarling Doom.

 

“Two. Year. Olds.”

 

“ _Maybe if I gave him the trophy I won he’d give up being evil? But I like that trophy. It’s shiny. I can’t give it to him. Doom will forever be evil. I’m sorry world._ ”

 

“I do not get paid enough to handle this.”

 

 Steve could almost taste the affection in Coulson’s words. The battle was hot on the tip of his tongue, like molten iron had been poured into his mouth and it tasted sweet.

 

“Sir we have a confirmed possession of XTY.”

 

And then the world seemed to splinter, the sound Steve imagined it would make if it were taking off a layer, a mask.

 

_Xx_

 

“Is that Tony?” Steve asked, his face caught in movie-screen shading, blue light and shadow caught over his skin like a thin blanket.  Movie nights were slow when Tony had meetings, when boardrooms called and Pepper stopped being nice (Tony often smiles and says _Pepper’s never nice to me, she’s an evil demon sent to organize my descent to hell with a wicked pony tail and Prada shoes._ ). The ones that were there were piled onto their separate havens, Bruce’s armchair was littered with candy wrappers and the smell of chemical discovery he’d left behind a few minutes earlier. Clint and Natasha seemed to be one being, Thor sat as close to the television as he could, and Steve reclined in the second couch, nursing the empty space beside him.

 

“What the actual fuck?”

 

“ _No._ That— _no_.”

 

“The Man of Iron hath transformed himself into a creature of forgotten time. He is more formidable in realms of magic than he suggested.”

 

“Thor, we all know you understand movies, you can stop now,” Clint moaned around a smile. Thor shot him a grin, wolfish and ancient.

 

“But. Seriously. _No_ ,” Bruce repeated, leaning towards the screen. “It’s a look alike. A brilliant look alike. Or he perfected cloning and he didn’t tell me. I will be so _very_ angry if he didn’t tell me.”

 

Steve thought Tony would have been the only one to laugh at that. The rest pretended it wasn’t said, for want of a whole living room.

 

“Someone look at the box,” Steve ordered, Cap voice settling over the room like a warm hand on a shoulder. Natasha scanned the nearly colorless depiction without interest and nodded confirmation.

 

“Starring Tony Stark as famous consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes,” she read. “Huh. That wasn’t in his file.”

 

Clint stared at the screen, his eyes a strange mixture between disgust and awe, his finger hovering over the play button. “Does he just wake up and think ‘I think I’ll be an actor today’ or ‘I think I’ll be Ironman today’, and then just do it? Jesus. I’d like to have his cash.”

 

“You already do,” Steve said sharply, his mouth pressed into a thin line. The Depression sometimes played havoc on his wallet, made him savor pennies and dimes.

 

“We live off his bank. SHEILD doesn’t pay enough to rent an apartment in the Bronx,” Bruce added calmly, running a hand back through his grey-streaked hair.

 

“Just, wow. How does he swing something like this?” Clint asked himself, seeming lost in the notion.

 

Natasha stretched out on the couch like a cat, her legs falling into the archer’s lap, and curled into his warmth. "Just press play, you’ll give yourself a headache with all that thinking.”

 

He knew better than to argue.

 

Steve watched Tony Stark become someone else, he watched him slip so easily into a mask and parade around with a quick talking, sultry kind of voice, like it’d been dragged through the lower London streets until it was just refined enough to be upper-class and just rugged enough to be eccentric.

 

Holmes seemed to move with more music, like he was playing a violin in his head, like he swayed from thought to the next, just on fast forward. And some secret voice said ‘Adagio’ and he slowed down for Watson, and Watson only.

 

Steve remembered reading those books, deep into the night with a single candle burning in the orphanage kitchen while the last cook went to sleep and the first one rose. He’d always pictured himself as Watson, loyal and war-battered, still strong enough to face the world. So would he.

 

Tony’s face carried the spark so well, lit up from the inside with morbid, burning curiosity that gripped like a vice and refused to let go. He could almost taste the eagerness with which his character took to the case. His hair was longer, wilder, like he’d been up for a dozen nights with that frenzied, hungry look in his eyes.

 

It was flawless, faultless, the ease with which Tony devolved into another.

 

“Honey, I’m home!” Tony sang into their entertainment center, strutting into the room, half out of his neatly pressed suit jacket and ready sling it across the floor. Pepper followed him with smartphone in hand, casting an irritated glance at the movement of his hands and the path of his jacket. She moved with grace six-inch heels shouldn’t possess, and fit herself delicately next to Natasha, with only the barest glances of acknowledgment to the others. Tony paused, his head cocked to the side. “Whathcha watching?”

 

The Avengers hushed him insistently.

 

“Really, you guys? That desperate for dirt?” he joked, folding himself down next to Steve with nimble fingers working on the knot of his tie.

 

“ _Shh_.”

_“_ Okay, jeez. _Fine.”_

 

“Tony,” Steve said, the beginnings of a Captain creeping into his voice with a soft look swimming in his eyes, as he turned away from the screen to meet the still-wild eyes of a still-eccentric genius. “Shut up.”

 

When the credits rolled, and the giddy, alive feeling had settled into Steve’s stomach, the way it always seemed to at the end of amovie that hit him _just right_ , they turned as one to Stark.

 

“Why?”

 

“Never mind ‘Why’, Cap. _How?!_ ” Clint asked, trying to connect the screen to the man.

 

Tony shrugged, a delicate movement that seemed to carry its own secret meanings. “I auditioned.”

 

Clint pointed at the screen, as if it would speak all the words that were eluding him and said, “ _How?_ ”

 

“He’s always been a wonderful liar--,” Pepper started.

 

“Story teller!” Tony interjected quickly. She moved on as if he hadn’t spoken, her hair now in a high ponytail and her feet tucked up underneath her.

 

“It was only a small jump to acting. He came to me, what was it, three years ago? _Good press was to be had, a dream to be realized, if only I could grace the world with a genius portraying a genius. Who better could play Sherlock Holmes, Pep, I ask you. Who?_ It was all very dramatic.” Her smile was infectious, it bled between them. Tony squirmed beneath her eyes. “I guess that was the _story teller_ in him.”

 

Steve liked Pepper, in a way one might like a little sister. She was fair in a sweet and dainty way, like she had to be protected, like she had to be cared for. But her grin was a shark’s and oh God, did she remind him of Peggy, make him think of the British spitfire with a wicked hook and a dazzling smile.

 

It didn’t hurt so much to think of her, now that the days passed without windowless rooms and flashbacks. Now that he went on walks in Central Park and smiled into the wind when a flash of red and gold went by and he made a home among the homeless.

 

“So you just. Did it?” Bruce asked skeptically. “You didn’t discover cloning?”

 

“I would tell you if I did,” Tony said seriously. Steve could see the glimmer-glow of his eyes, alive and sharp. “They didn’t have to pick me. I think Pepper was bribing them _not_ to pick me.” His voice carried something soft, like an early morning breeze off the ocean, the kind that kisses your skin sweetly.

 

“I was.”

 

“See, she was.” Tony nodded to himself and wriggled back into the warmth of the couch, leeching from Steve’s side. “Had to be careful, though, after filming I came back saying things like ‘bloody’ and ‘brilliant’ and forgetting that I wasn’t _actually_ Sherlock Holmes. Deducing people was incredibly fun. Ask Pepper.”

 

“Don’t. Ask.”

 

“Only _one_ Fortune 500 company cut all ties with us. I’d call that a success.”

 

Pepper reminded Steve of a patient mother sometimes, Tony a bouncing toddler, too brilliant for his own good and always bounding from one thought to the next, so fast you could barely keep up. But you did, because someone had to take care of him.

 

“I read your file. I _wrote_ most of it, but from all the interviews and all the biographies, no one mentions acting,” Natasha remarked, twisting to lean around Pepper. Her gaze was sharp, catching on the micro-expressions that passed over his face in deluges. The tightening of the skin around his eyes, the way his lips pursed and then thinned, then widened into a half-smile.

 

“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.'” Tony quoted, an accent rolling coolly from his tongue. “It got a lot of attention when it came out. When they heard that I did the work pro bono, donated my salary, and I wouldn’t be attending any of the premiers so I didn’t overshadow the film, they dropped the stories. People see but they do not observe.”

 

So Steve looked, really looked. Saw the heavy set of his shoulders and the oil stains on his cuffs, the way his hair kicked up in every direction and his fingers tapped incessantly against his left knee. He wondered how many masks there were, if he could peel them back layer by layer. If he could pick apart the concrete around his heart and swallow the flood of poisonous water, if he could dust away all the ashes he’d collected over his heart and absolve him of his sins.

 

That night, when the darkness made a home inside a bedroom he half-considered his, and Tony was fading fast next to him, stretching out towards a sleep without the trembling screams the nightmares would bring, Steve let his eyes trace the ceiling. He thought about Watson and devotion, and what it means to be by someone’s side. Always.

 

“'This fellow may be very clever.' I said to myself, 'but he is certainly very conceited’,” he whispered into the darkness, and felt a grin lay easy on his lips.

 

“A man after my own heart,” Tony said brightly, and it was kind of like the rest of the world had floated away, fallen backwards into the sky. They were on their own in a secret moment they would carry in their breast pockets, to pull out later and smile at.

 

The genius fell asleep, curled on his side with the blankets drawn up to his chin, it was two in the morning, and the day-glow-night of New York refused to die and he was so invariably happy. He liked this side, maskless and easy, the planes of his face slack with rest and gentle, almost childlike. Steve loved that he could see this far in.

 

“’I have not lived for years with Sherlock Holmes for nothing.’”

 

_Xx_

 

There were some moments, where bleeding time sped up, Tony thought. Where it caught on a major artery and suddenly it was everywhere, all at once.

 

Time scattered on the wind and spattered the pavement with abstract art.

 

So in a singular, perfect moment, a thousand things seemed to happen.

 

The HUD catalogued them all, and he might play it back later, to watch the exact moment it all went wrong at a slow crawling pace. Where the lightning hit, exactly, and who it came from, he’d search it back to fingertips or hammer and where the terror set in. The moment the earth itself seemed to split, so that all the shadows and dark things could find their way back to the surface, hell hounds and demons held contracts in his name, he was sure.

 

He wanted to find the second the charge sent their comm units reeling with static and whitenoise and repair it with an easy twitch of his magnetic fingers.

 

He wanted to find the moment the temporary dam split, where the water was walled off for maintenance, so he could trace the patterns the crack made with the tip of a metal finger.  Maybe heal it. So he could feel the weight of a pinned-in lake groan and ache to breathe against his body, to swallow him up and savor the taste, to infect all the hidden spaces inside of him and sit there, swell and fall to the rate of his breathing until he didn’t anymore.

 

Indifferent and hungry for space.

 

Instead he reacted, shoved his body at the wall with everything he had and the suit kept him there, still and shining dully in the half-dark of a constant bright-flash of otherworldly light. Things moved too fast.

 

The strain on Ironman made it hard to breathe.

 

“ _Power at 70%, redirecting to the external support system_ ,” JARVIS informed him quietly, a nervousness embedded inside of code and electric life. “ _I fear you should have spent your time repairing the fine cracks_.”

 

“For some reason, developing a truly functional Skynet seemed more important,” he grunted, pushing until he felt like he could shift the earth’s spin.

 

“ _I often wonder about you, Sir._ ”

 

“Yeah, you…and me…both.”

 

And then there was Steve, another moment, another endless bundle of seconds or nanoseconds or nonseconds. Time or Not Time. Tony wasn’t sure anymore, if that kind of continuum continued in the perfect synchronized moments people assumed. If time was a human invention, maybe he could manipulate it, stretch out his seconds waking from along sleep and all the time when Steve smiled at him.

 

There were no smiles now, it was all fear and the pain of exertion and trying to pin in a collapsing ocean.

 

White and Blue and Red and Gold.

 

Steve’s teeth were bared, a look of concentration driven down deep into the contorted grooves of his face and the marred expression of the American Dream. Force, power, will.

 

That was all he needed to keep the water back. He believed he could.

 

Tony loved that about him.

 

“ _What the hell is going on down there?!_ ” Coulson screamed, the comm snapping back into an efficient click that made the inside of his helmet echo. For a moment he was lost in the noise, lost in the fear pinned in the Agent’s voice. He remembered the way bloodstained cards looked, and swallowed against the heavy pressure.

 

He felt like Atlas.

 

“There’s a twenty inch crack, in the dam, deep from what the sensor can tell. Cap and I are holding it back, but it’s still spreading. Widow, Hawkeye, you have to get the XTY out _now_ or half of New York City’s gonna get a free lobotomy. While I’m all for affordable health care, I don’t think many of them want this operation.” He spoke at that breakneck pace he always did when the equations flowed and the numbers rolled in, when they played light shows behind his eyes and put the rest of the Avengers into some strange kind of trusting peace. Tony was the numbers guy, he could get them through.

 

“ _Thor, pin down Doom and get him out of there and packed up nice and tight. Do whatever you have to, to get Hulk out of that aqueduct, I do not need a second Harlem in my paperwork. We don’t have time to play games anymore, people. Cap, Ironman, how long do you think you can hold it?”_

 

“This thing is only temporary for a reason, there are hardly any failsafes and the crack is splintering. Just me, you’d get three minutes, maybe a bit more. With the two of us, we should be able to hold it five, possibly six.”

 

“Fantastic,” Clint muttered down the line, his voice strained with the weight of brain-leeching chemicals on his back. “Here Brucie, Brucie.”

 

“Why did you…quantify it?” Steve bit out from between his teeth. Tony turned the emotionless mask onto the Captain for the barest of moments and hoped he understood the gesture: Elaborate. “Of course it’s the two of us. I’m not leaving you here.” And maybe that should have been soft and insistent, but it came out like an order.

 

A soldier speaking to another soldier.

 

Lightning flashed behind him, and the Titans roared, and their seconds slipped into nothingness. Thor wouldn’t get it done in enough time, Hulk was already shifting back to a shade of pink, shrinking down in the strobe-light tunnel. Hawkeye was tugging him, half of XTY shouldered and ready at the rope ladder to shove it up into sunlight, Natasha behind him. Doom cut their path down with electricity and pieces of Doombots.

 

They wouldn’t make it.

 

Russian curses filtered down the line and then, silence.

 

“ _Widow? Black Widow, what is your status?_ ” Coulson demanded. Silence consumed the line as they waited.

 

“My ankle. Sprained, three inch gash above it. I can’t evac the drug and still get out. Not in the four minutes we have left.” Her voice was more than just reluctant, it was bitten off rage.

 

Tony pushed in the world, pressed with all he had and turned the helmet to Steve, impassive eyes saying all the things he couldn’t, all the things he wouldn’t.

 

“No.”

 

Steve’s voice was impenetrable. It was all the walls he’d ever built around his soul from orphanage age, it was war veteran and loner and hero and a kid from Brooklyn and everything else that refused to be pushed down.

 

He spoke through the speaker, broadcasted his words out to the air around Steve, so that the mechanical touch of the suit would hide his fear. So that Captain America wouldn’t hear his voice shake.

 

“ _We don’t have time, Captain. This is the only way._ ”

 

“You told me you needed Captain America there. I’m here. I can’t let you take this on your own,” Steve whispered, the strain in his arms leeching into his voice until the words came out slow and desperate. Like they’d been dragged from some darkened corner of his heart.

 

Something in Tony broke and something else mended. 

 

“ _The numbers won’t add up. I can do this._ ”

 

He could hear the hesitancy even through the automated voice of Ironman, smell the fear in his words.

 

Because sometimes he thought raindrops would crawl backwards, up the slope of his neck and into his eyes, where they would _drip-drip_ until it filled him from the inside and there was no more room to breathe. Sometimes he thought about a single drop of condensation falling from the workshop ceiling and touching a wire held between his fingers, and the rocking shocks and trembling fear. Sometimes he thought about the smell. How the water smelled like pain and defecation and death and fear all wrapped up into one entity, one being.

 

How much he wanted to run.

 

“Put the faceplate up!” Steve said suddenly, he had to shout over the sound of cracking concrete and metal and the shake of Gods tumbling into the walls with lightning in their eyes.

 

Small trails of water mapped their way down the wall facing, spit onto his suit.

 

Tony pushed harder, stayed firmly within the safety, closed his eyes against the HUD, and pretended like his face wasn’t ashen and pale and his eyes weren’t roaming the inside of his eyelids looking for an escape hatch.

 

“Put. The. Faceplate. _Up_.” And his voice was a desperate prayer and a lost man clinging to the last pieces of light, it was an addict on a final cigarette, it was the wandering finding a home. It was sentient toasters named after Pokemon characters and trips to Malibu and motorcycles and surprises and Sherlock Holmes and falling asleep so easily curled next to warmth. It was everything.

 

So he did it.

 

Xx

 

Steve had found that life sort of all happens at once.

 

The wall groaned, a feral yawn of power and weight and Tony’s faceplate slid up and his eyes looked shadowed, terrified and strong and Steve took his hands from the wall, felt it shift, watching fissures widen and gape like ancient wounds, and watched Ironman take the weight, and Steve kissed him.

 

Tony’s mouth was hot against his, alive and like a white fire that burned away everything in its path but the heat. His gloved fingers slipped against cool metal and the air around them seemed to grow still. It was everything he never imagined, and everything he could want. It was like worlds colliding. It was like the sun had turned on inside his chest. It was like hot embers had been pressed onto his tongue and it was so _good_.

 

It was like waking up.

 

It was like time held transfixed in a moment without ice, without freezing. Like it had been consumed by heartbeats and the orange-ember glow on the inside of his eyes and the taste of Tony on the tip of his tongue.

 

If the world were to end in any way, Steve thought it should go like this.

 

Eaten by its own passion, its own love.

 

Alive, in its last moments, in a way it never was before.

 

Xx

 

When it ended, they felt the breath between the mix, took pieces of the other inside their lungs and savored it.

 

The water was starting to gush, had pooled to cover the tops of their boots and Tony couldn’t breathe, he was clinging to his air.

 

Steve had a minute and twenty six seconds.

 

A moment later (a second, nano or non, two or five?) and Steve was all shield and speed and power and he moved like the earth itself had spit hot fire beneath his boots, like someone had pressed the sun into his chest and told him to _go_ , like a new kind of serum had been shot into his veins and all there was, was the perfection of his movements. The fluidity of his grace.

 

Water rose to metal shins and kept coming.

 

Tony closed the faceplate, and braced himself.

 

Doom went down quickly, vibranium slammed into the back of his head and the lightning stopped just shy of the surface of water and Thor flew him out, his hammer shining brilliantly in a piece of sunlight.

 

The water was up to Steve’s waist.

 

“ _Natasha!_ ”

 

She held the drugs above her head, a thinly packaged white cube of powder, and he could see her arms shaking the closer he moved to her. He could barely see in the blackness, sensed the sound of her breathing more than anything, sloshed blindly through the rising tide.

 

“Steve, just--”

 

He placed her on his shoulder carefully, let her hold the drug tight between capable hands, and scattered water around him like a spinning fountain of a thousand diamonds.

 

He felt like he couldn’t breathe, like the ice was crystallizing his lungs.

 

He couldn’t see, sought out a single beam of light, the entry point, and nearly slammed into his motorcycle as it bobbed past. Something in him seemed to snap, rip down the center and a kiss wasn’t enough. He wanted to say all the things he’d been putting off, he wanted to thank Tony Stark for everything he was and everything he’d given him.

 

“ _Steve get out of here!_ ” Tony's voice was an order.

 

He went.

 

He made it in a minute and fifteen.

 

The crash shook the whole world, he’d swear it.

 

Four agents had to hold him back from diving in again, as the white water roared through the aqueduct and spit angrily through their escape hatch like a geyser.

 

“ _Tony!_ ”

 

Xx

 

It was sort of like choking on space, having darkness envelope you like that.

 

Having it rip you at the seams and crawl against your insides, infect you with its endlessness, and the feeling of floating and falling, all wrapped up inside your eyes.

 

Tony had never really known darkness.

 

He’d been born beneath the sun, raised into the sterile light of his father’s workshops and the warmly-lit corridors of their mansions. He had stars pressed into his eyes at birth, and brilliance wrote its way in numbers inside of his dreams.

 

Electricity had been alive around him like the thin, shiny veins of the world itself, alight with flickers and flame and light. It penetrated the darkness, cut through the nighttime and spanned his ceiling with a sky of circuitry and light-bulb constellations.

 

Then it was streetlights and open roads, headlights, the sharp-flicker-flare of a strobe light in his vision and two shots down before the grey of unconsciousness encroached on his vision. It was an Afghani sky, dotted with a billion pinpricks, it was a cave lit with the dull glow of a single lamp, and a blowtorch.

 

It was the HUD, alive and thrumming with the soliloquy of equations passing through his head and sparking bright and burning with the luminescent calligraphy of calculations. It was a trail of white-hot energy behind him when he flew.

 

It was everything.

 

There was only water, after the lights had all gone out.

 

There was only weightlessness inside of weight inside of nothing.

 

The suit held so carefully to the bottom, like butterfly wings pinned, and the fine rush inward, little trails of water. Pressure. Like something was pressing on the center of his chest and threatening the glow. It was sort of like choking on the sun, being so consumed by that drowned-night.

 

Like all the brightness had been tucked away, and all that was left was the burning in his lungs, the ache not breathing pressed on him. The one that pushed and pulled against him and left him lacking in the way of sensation. He couldn’t feel the tips of his fingers, or the phantom kiss against his lips, the ghostly touch to his jaw.

 

There was only the water.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I make Tony Stark play Sherlock Holmes in the Downey film? Yes, yes I did. Why? Because he's Tony Stark and he does what he wants.  
> There will be another part to this series. It will have multiple chapters.  
> Thanks so much for reading!  
> -Han


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